Tutorial: Custom Bone Shapes in Blender in 5 min

Support Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
1

A quick tip on creating and assigning custom bone shapes to your armature in blender.

My Website: http://deniszholob.99k.org/
Tutorial website link: http://deniszholob.99k.org/tutorials/rigging-custom-bone-shapes/
(Download the starter and finished .blend files here)
Tutorial Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aRdurh30f0

Tutorial Level: Beginner
This tutorial covers:
*Creating Custom Bone Shapes
*Assigning the shapes to your armature bones
*Adding Color
*Fixing Rotation and scale
*Fixing Normals

2

You could mention the ‘at’ field which relocates your custom shape to another location which is quite useful when you want to make small custom shapes but don’t want them all crowding together. You can also do this by moving the mesh for the custom shape in edit mode and the custom shape will follow relative to the bone’s orientation, but this can lead to some wild swinging around sometimes. But otherwise pretty well done video and best of all - short!

3

Thanks DruBan!
That is a great point!

Here is a screeshot:

  • Point the “Custom Shape” to a mesh you created.
  • Point the “At” field to the same bone, to lock the shape orientation to the bone orientation in edit mode!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]294864[/ATTACH]

4

Your attachment didn’t work but IMO the ‘at’ field’s best use is to move the shape to a location other than around the bone it belongs to, while still working exactly the same way as if it had not been moved, so pointing to a DIFFERENT bone is more common IMO…

e.g. all the transform shapes can be moved to a spot above the figure so as not to interfere with the posing bones … so you might put an empty there and ‘at’ all those shapes to that empty.