Nested Bone Layers
Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger
Nested Bone Layers
As I peruse the examples included with AS, I see a lot of characters with nested bone layers. There's no mention of rigging a character this way in the manual, and I'm curious as to the advantages and disadvantages, as well as the best technigues to develop and use a character with nested bone layers...
Nested bone layers... are... not totally neccesary.. it depends on what you need to do.
You could probably have ALL the bones on one layer... having nested bones makes things a bit easier to see and animate in some cases. Less clutter. Bones don't cover up or get in the way of other bones.
For instance... a hand might have a bunch of bones for the fingers. You probably wouldn't need to have access to those bones as much as all the other ones. And you won't accidentally move a finger bone when you want to move just the hand... or visa versa.
A nested bone layer can be controlled by one bone in the parent bone layer. It makes keeping track of parenting bones a bit... compartmentalized... not so overwhelming.
I like this sometimes... it allows me to work on "pieces" of a character seperately... then import... scale and adjust... and link that sub bone layer to a parent bone.
I have dynamic bones for a characters hair. Putting this in a nested bone layer is just easier to work with.
Another reason for nested bones would be for the bones influence. Using a nested bone layer prevents those other bones from effecting the vectors in the child bone layer. This can be helpful.
For instance... I had a character with a dress that I wanted to... move with dynamic bones. I found that flexible binding looked much better than region binding...
... I had to move the dress to a nested bone layer so the bones wouldn't effect the rest of the character. The body UNDER the dress used region binding. (I then linked the body bones from the top bone layer to control the dress "body" bones using a layer script). The combination worked very well in this case.
These are some of the reasons I use nested bones.
-vern
You could probably have ALL the bones on one layer... having nested bones makes things a bit easier to see and animate in some cases. Less clutter. Bones don't cover up or get in the way of other bones.
For instance... a hand might have a bunch of bones for the fingers. You probably wouldn't need to have access to those bones as much as all the other ones. And you won't accidentally move a finger bone when you want to move just the hand... or visa versa.
A nested bone layer can be controlled by one bone in the parent bone layer. It makes keeping track of parenting bones a bit... compartmentalized... not so overwhelming.
I like this sometimes... it allows me to work on "pieces" of a character seperately... then import... scale and adjust... and link that sub bone layer to a parent bone.
I have dynamic bones for a characters hair. Putting this in a nested bone layer is just easier to work with.
Another reason for nested bones would be for the bones influence. Using a nested bone layer prevents those other bones from effecting the vectors in the child bone layer. This can be helpful.
For instance... I had a character with a dress that I wanted to... move with dynamic bones. I found that flexible binding looked much better than region binding...
... I had to move the dress to a nested bone layer so the bones wouldn't effect the rest of the character. The body UNDER the dress used region binding. (I then linked the body bones from the top bone layer to control the dress "body" bones using a layer script). The combination worked very well in this case.
These are some of the reasons I use nested bones.
-vern
My biggest use of them is for a head bone layer underneath the main body layer. The head is most often the thing I need to buld as a separate group, and I use a lot of bones inn the face - for varying expression, a few in the eyebrow, matbe to control nasolabial folds (although that might often go in the mouth Switch sublayer - which also can use bones if you haven't seen that - mad useful), moving the jaw line, on one character the nose so they could sniff something. As heyvern said, hands are a good example. I use a lot of bones, and it's all too easy to grab the wrong one if theres no organization.