Bone missing but still parented.

[Sjwilliams51]

Hi everyone,

I rigged a body and later went to move the arms to test out my smart bones again, but found that one of my forearm bones is not there.
I figured I might have accidentally deleted it, but it appears that the hand bone is still parented to its location, as well as it’s location being parented to the upper arm bone.
The smart bone still works when I move the timeline, but there is no bone to select if I want to manually move the forearm bone!

Can anyone shed some light on what might have happened?

Thanks in advance.

[synthsin75]

Try the menu command Bone>Show All Bones.

If it shows up, make sure it's not set to Shy.

[Greenlaw]

You must have either enabled Shy for the bone or applied Hide. These are two different modes but either one will 'hide' the bone.

If it's Shy, you need to select Bone - Hide/Show Shy Bone (Ctrl-Shift-O).

If it's Hide, you need to select Show All Bones.

BTW, I like to use Shy Bone when I need to hide bones in a rig or control that I don't want accidentally animated by the animator. I can easily unhide them and re-hide them when I need to by using the shortcut.

Hide can also be used to hide bones you don't want animated but you can't toggle their visibility like you can with Shy. This is better for bones you really want to leave hidden all the time.

Hope this helps.

[synthsin75]

Bone>Show All Bones will also show Shy bones.

[Sjwilliams51]

“Show All Bones” fixed the issue.
It wasn’t a shy bone though.
Not sure what happened there.

Thanks for the help guys!!!

[Greenlaw]

Bone>Show All Bones will also show Shy bones.

That's true, but doing Show/Hide Shy first will make it clear you if have a Shy bone active somewhere. Even after using Show All Bones, any Shy bones will remain active as Shy so, in general, this is useful to know if you set the option unintentionally.