Suggestions for Rigging and Constraints

Archive User Feedback
1

I’ve been into rigging characters for about 1 year now and i have some feedback that i would like to provide regarding constraints and some other features.

Weight Painting :

1. Box Hide - It would be really convenient if we had an option to hide parts of the mesh during weight painting, example would be painting 2 sided wings with 2d falloff ON, but currently the painting would also go over to the body and it needs to be done at specific angles to avoid that from happening.

2. Invert brush - The same feature sculpting has but for the weight painting, holding Ctrl would invert Add brush into Subtract. This is just really to make it faster to make changes.

Constraints :

1. Child of - The current way it works is that the constraint takes the parent information and puts it into the “local space with parent” of the bone/object. What i suggest is adding the option to set from which space it takes that information and to which it is applied, basically the same settings that can be found on something like “copy rotation”. Use for that is that you can give multiple parents for one bone/object without it overlapping and drifting away when the any other parent is moved.

2. Copy location - Offset settings should keep the current location of the bone/object. Currently it will set the location of it to the world origin which renders that setting useless most of the time.

3. Pivot - It would be nice if the Pivot constraint got some more love and was not so buggy to use, it’s a really cool constraint but sadly it’s pretty much unusable.

Other features :

1. Bendy bones - Bendy bones have a really cool feature that allows to set the number of segments the bone will have. This feature would be really awesome if it could be combined with “Spline IK” constraint. As an example i will use a Tail. Usually tails have a lot of bones in them to make the deformations smooth. To use Spline IK constraint you need a pretty long bone chain that is quite annoying to weight paint. If the bendy bone segment setting worked together with Spline IK, it would save up a lot of time from the painting perspective but it would also make it “procedural” in a sense. Resolution of that tail deformation could be changed afterwards if we’re not happy with it.

That’s the current list of the things that would immensely improve the Rigging workflow in my honest opinion. I hope some of it can get implemented down the road ^^

2 Likes
2

About weight painting :
1 : there is a way to hide parts of mesh. You can select faces of mesh by enabling paint mask (M).
Selected faces can be hidden by pressing H. Faces hidden as is, can not be painted.
You can also switch to vertex selection mask to select only vertices of a vertex group, and switch back to paint mask mode to have corresponding faces selected.
But you are right, it would be consistent with other paint modes to have a box hide tool.
Or select/deselect buttons in Vertex Groups panel in properties editor could be visible when Paint mask is enabled.

2 : That is forcing to remap some shortcuts. Ctrl LMB is used to select active bone of armature in pose mode. When Paint Mask is activated, it is used to select active face.

About Constraints :
1 : Have you tested recently added Armature constraint ?
2 : I think that Visual Location keying set is supposed to solve the issue.
3 : can you describe more precisely what is wrong with the constraint ?
Maybe you are referring to bugreports already written, that would help developers to define priorities if you could link them in your post.

3

Weights:

  1. I find this method really unintuitive and annoying to use, simplifying it to something like sculpt mode has would be really great.
  2. It could totally just be binded to some other keys or just left in the shortcut settings as a “hidden feature”, i would honestly love that.

Constraints:

  1. Armature constraints suffers the same problem where it uses the “local with parent” space by default, the main reason i would want to pick which space it takes from is for something like eye rigs with 8 bones but each following the parent path of the eye but at different percentage values, sadly currently if you were to move the root of the armature for example, those bones would just fly off since they use the current parent “head” and the percentage that the constraint is giving it “eyes”.
  2. I’m not quite aware of that, i will have to look into it so thanks for letting me know.
  3. The current issue with Pivot constraint is pretty apparent when you have some kind of bone structure and the bone you are giving the constraint to is parented to something already, it will start doing the “shaking” and switching places every frame when you try to move it. It’s the same type of problem you would get when using “stretch to” on a parent of that bone, blender just doesn’t know what to do so it constantly jumps between 2 spaces, the difference is that Pivot constrains should really just affect it the same way you would use 3d cursor to rotate something.