Standard-Like Bones

Standard-Like Bones combines the best visual features from Blender with industry standard tools like Maya or Unity.

The Problem :

Blender prioritizes bone orientation over bone relationships. Other software tools usually do the opposite, and prioritize bone relationships, but can lack in showing bone orientation or roll.

The Solution :

With the Standard-Like bones plugin, we are redrawing bone relationships and properly showing their orientation in the viewport, while at the same time giving functions and features to better control connections, tails, joint creation, and more.

Firstly, We are drawing the bone relationships as we normally would. This makes the default Head / Tail relationship nonsense not necessary. At the same time, we are visualizing the tail of each bone with a triangle. This triangle points towards the true roll direction of the bone, ( which you don't even get with default Blender octahedral visualizer ). By doing this, we can have a clean way of visualizing and controlling our bones.

Lets go over the functions per section :

Bone Functions

• Snap to Bone - Snaps the current bones tail to the next joint

• Clamp Tail to Radius - Retains the tail of the current bone within the joints radius.

• Set Tail to Radius - 1 time call to clamp the tail to the radius

• Disconnect Bone - Disconnects selected Bones

• Connect Bone - Connects selected Bones

Armature Functions

• Joint Color - Sets the visual color of the joint visualizers

• Tail Color - Sets the visual color of the tail visualizers

• Show in Front - Toggle for showing Armature in front of meshes

• Default Snap to Bone - Sets whether newly created bones tails snap to the next joint

• Default Clamp Tail to Radius - Sets whether newly created bones tails retain within their joints radius

Global Settings

• Auto Disconnect Bones - Automatically disconnects bones for imported rigs or new bones.

We also include a new Create Joints tool in the plugin. The purpose of this is to act similar to the extrude on click, but instead of clicking to adjust / spawn a joints tail, we are clicking where we want the actual joint itself to spawn. This way, we can adjust the default Armature Settings and create bone chains that have clean looking tails.

Benefits

This plugin makes it easier to actually work with bones.

Able to cleanly visualize more information in an intuitive way.

Gives controls and functions to adjust rigs, making so they can be worked with, or exported for others in just a couple clicks.

NO ADDITIVE OBJECTS! This plugin completely redraws in the 3D viewport, so no annoying or confusing added object to deal with to try and achieve the same result.

For a more descript explainer, watch the video tutorial going behind how to use the plugin, and the reasoning for it. Thank you for taking a look!