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  • Published 15 Jan 2025

'Smooth' Parenting (and Deform) for Skeleton Bones

Hey, folks!

Why not making Parenting Relations less 'stiff', for the Bones in the Skeleton?

SmoothParentingDeform.png

'Just' need to set overarching Influence ('Power'?) Slider Button properties for each of the major Bone's properties (Location/Rotation/Scale); I've allowed myself to also connect this idea with an older one, of the Deform property of a Deform Bone (analogue overarching concept, but you can ignore this, as it's a bit more complicated to conceive; better focus on the Parenting Relations).

Each one of those individual 'Influence' or 'Power' Slider Button properties, would be Key-Frameable & Driveable... Because.

Conceptually, for Rigging & Animation, the consequences of these root changes would be gigantic (assuming this is feasible without breaking the core of Blender's Parenting & Skinning system). Just in the case of Automations, we could just play with the individuated Influences of Parenting Relations without even requiring plenty Bone Constraints/Drivers. Rigging lots of differents things in Blender would be become way more versatile than it is now. Very likely such features would only work inside Blender and not be Exportable (but isn't it the way of major developments anyways? e.g., Geometry Nodes). Because it is about Bones, at least in what concerns the Bone Transforms (and not so much in what concerns the Deforms, which are more Mesh Skinning -related), the Pose Bones would still be Bakeable.

Because such Options for Animation & Rigging would be so valuable and usable, I believe they would need to be Displayed, besides the Properties Editor, somewhere in the 3D Viewport Editor as well... maybe the Sidebar Region? (unsure because I don't remember it focusing on individual Bones, except for some Addons).

What do you think?

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Development Status: Open

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pxy-gnomes
15 Jan 2025

1 Comment

chris.lend

This is quite unlikely to happen because Math. What you are describing is basically a Child Of constraint which is notorious for working poorly. You can quite easily create a setup with a slider using Copy Location or Copy Transforms