Doing this without Bendy Bones

[Bryan Johnstone]

So I remember you saying Bendy Bones are a blender only system. If I need build a rig that can work outside of blender do I just subdivide a normal a lot?

[spikeyxxx]

Bendy Bones are a lot more than just a subdivided Bone; they are based on a Bezier Curve, so you can bend them by manipulating the two ( per Bendy Bone) ‘handles’. This general behavior is really hard (if at all possible) to acchieve without using Bendy Bones, but if you have a specific situation, you can make a rig with ‘normal’ Bones, that does what it needs to do. But it would probably involve more Bones and some (quite a lot, depending on the situation)  Constraints.

[Wayne Dixon]

Hi Bryan,
Bendy Bones, used to be called Bezier Bones….which is a better name imo because they also describe how they work (as Spikey mentioned)

You can get a similar functionality working outside of Blender, however Blender is the only software that can deform bones like a bezier curve.  That means if you export it to other software, your bendy bone will be 1 straight ‘normal’ bone and will deform like that (ie – not bezier)

You can export the mesh cache data and not worry about having an armature in the other software.  That’s one way around this issue.

To expand a little on your idea about subdividing a bone – yes you can do that but there’s a few caveats.

Say you have a bendy bone with 10 segments and you want to get that into a game engine with the same deformation (and you need the armature animation)

What you can do is copy the bendy bone, and then subdivided it for each segment (10 bones), make sure that those 10 bones are weight painted correctly, and then constrain those new bones to the old bendy bone(which no longer controls the deformation).

If you export the def bones armature into a game engine – it will work.  

Hope that makes sense.

[Author]

Posts