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  • Published 29 Aug 2025

Custom bones should have shaders

Custom bone shapes should carry the shaders of objects referenced for them instead of just grey mesh or flat assigned color.

The existing custom bone shape system has two issues:

  • Manual bone color changes feel disconnected from modern Blender's shader-based workflow
  • Custom shapes with faces cannot display their referenced mesh shaders, so most riggers just delete faces and focus on shape because there is no option for additional visual context

Expose bone display properties (wire color, wire size, bone color) through the Shaders panel with state-specific controls for:

  • Inactive bones
  • Selected bones
  • Active selected bones

Enable custom bone shapes to display shaders from their referenced mesh objects when faces are present. This would allow riggers to:

  • Utilize color-coded controls for different bones in the familiar shader system
  • Create better visual indicators for property bones and specialized -controls
  • Implement context-sensitive visibility through shader transparency

For riggers this enhances our ability to communicate rig functionality through visual design, enabling more intuitive and context-rich control schemes.

For animators it allows for clearer visual feedback and better understanding of rig structure through color-coded and shader-enhanced bone displays.

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Development Status: Open

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Osami
29 Aug 2025

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