Modified Translate Bone for animation?

Kazerad · Post by **Kazerad** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 5:14 am

Hey, long time no see guys!

I have run into a bit of a problem. I feel most comfortable when I keep my skeletons pretty simple and scale/translate bones frequently during animation to keep it loose feeling. However, this means I have to frequently switch between three different bone tools while animating - scale bone, translate bone, and manipulate bone.

By contrast, I really like the way the Translate Bone tool works on frame 0; I can move bones by grabbing their base, rotate them by moving their tip side to side, and elongate them by pulling on their tip. It's very fast and elegant for positioning them.

I personally know very little about scripting. Is there a way to modify the Translate Bone tool so it retains the "3 tools in 1" versatility it has on frame 0, yet can be used for animation?

Genete · Post by **Genete** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 5:58 am

Fazek's replacement LM tools.
Don't miss this post neither.
-G

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 12:15 pm

I've wanted that myself. Fazek's don't really have a universal bone tool. I've looked into it, but haven't figured out how to do the frame zero manipulation elsewhere. If you don't use many of the modifier keys for the bone tools, it'd be easy to make one tool that scales, rotates, and translates depending on which modifier key you hold.

Don't know if that's much better than switching tools though. I still plan to keep looking at doing that frame zero functionality.

Kazerad · Post by **Kazerad** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 8:46 pm

I checked the existing scripts (including Fazek's) but didn't find anything geared toward faster bone manipulation.

synthsin75 wrote:If you don't use many of the modifier keys for the bone tools, it'd be easy to make one tool that scales, rotates, and translates depending on which modifier key you hold.

Don't know if that's much better than switching tools though. I still plan to keep looking at doing that frame zero functionality.

Modifier keys would be a lot better, I think.

At the very least it would cut the number of keypresses in half. I tried looking into doing that myself, but as mentioned I know very little about scripting. I can see where modifier keys exist in the code, but have no idea how to go about combining the scripts.

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 10:04 pm

I just want to say that your character development post (viewtopic.php?t=8967) was very inspiring to me when I first found this forum.

Anyway, 7feet made a rotate bone tool that does the modifier tool changes.

http://www.mediafire.com/?y2wuzdl2qtw

If I get around to it, I may improve on this a bit. Maybe base it on the manipulate bone tool instead.

Kazerad · Post by **Kazerad** » Sun Apr 19, 2009 4:46 am

Aha! Thanks for the find, 7feet's tool was just what I was looking for.

synthsin75 wrote:I just want to say that your character development post (viewtopic.php?t=8967) was very inspiring to me when I first found this forum.

Glad I could help inspire you

. Ironically I never did manage to get a rig I was happy with from my experiments in that thread. You might've noticed as soon as I started adding clothes I slid back into my old habit of making characters as low-poly as possible so I could manually adjust points, which was the exact opposite of what I was trying to accomplish.

I've been thinking about giving it another shot, though, and this bone tool will make it a lot easier this time around.