Select Bones using the Eyedropper in Constraints Modifier
Blender has the awesome ability to select objects by using an eyedropper next to the object field. When you try to add bones in the bone constraints it can only add the rig that you select. It would be really cool if you can select a bone and it would pull in the rig and the bone selected.
8 Comments
For reference, we also talked about it here .
In short: Would be good to have, but not so easy to implement.
* @Julian Eisel * Isn't it the same as a select bones operation? Or can an at least be reused for that.
Would this be any easier to achieve in 2.8x?
This is already possible using the <kbd>E</kbd> hotkey. Hover your mouse cursor over the Target field in the constraint and press <kbd>E</kbd>. You'll get an eyedropper that you can use for selecting any bone or object in the scene.
This could be more clear in the UI, of course, but the feature does exist.
Thanks for help. I had no idea that it existed! It is amazing how fast new features get added when you ask :)
Little follow-up on this. It turns out that I was wrong. The feature exists for objects, but it doesn't currently work on bones. This might be a dependency graph issue.
Definitely not dependency graph - I tried looking into this yesterday, but found instead that it's just slightly problematic how we find what's under the mouse in the 3D view.
Specifically, the current operator only checks for objects, and can only deal with ID blocks. I tried extending it to support grabbing other types data instead (if the button property type requires something different), but the big hurdle is that since we rely on the OpenGL selection buffer for this stuff, it all gets a bit hairy. (Note - the default selection stuff also uses this same OpenGL selection buffer, but there, we allow selecting either bones OR objects. Here, we need bones only, which turns out to be quite tricky to do!)
So: Desirable - yes, Doable - maybe (by not in a straightforward way).
Thanks for looking into it. I was hoping it could be added to the current functionality but completely understand when things get more difficult than it looks.