I’ve done a search and can’t find anything on this, but, is there a way to hide part of a mesh when rigging?
When rigging a hand, it’s difficult to tell exactly how the bone is sitting in the hand / finger due to the whole hand being visible. It would be good if you could mask a portion of it out so you can focus on each finger at a time. I’ve tried x-ray mode for the armature and wireframe for the mesh but it still feels cumbersome. Is this possible at all?
Select some vertices in Edit mode and key H and then ALT+H to get them back visible again.
Cheers, Clock.
There’s the mask modifier
You can always use a clipping border to just zero in on the part you want to view. Alt B then select your border and Alt B return.
I understand hiding points when in edit mode. The problem here is, I am editing the position of the bones of an armature, trying to align them with hte geometry of a mesh object. If I hide faces / points of the mesh in edit mode, on exit to object mode in order to select the armature for editing, the whole object once again becomes visible. As far as I am aware, masking only works in weight painting, where you can’t alter the location / rotation of a bone.
Ahh, that gets me close, be cool if you could assign vertex groups to a clipping mode, that would be very useful.
Did you try this?
Because I did and it works. I added the mask modifier to a mesh and entered a vertex group name in the vertex group field. The entire mesh disappeared from the view port except the vertex group I named. I then entered edit mode for the armature, and still, all I saw in the 3d view was the vertex group named in the mask modifier…
Seems to me like it worked for what you want…
But then again, I wonder how dense the mesh is that you have to hide parts of the mesh to rig it…
Randy
Durr, nope, never looked at the mask modifier. There’s so much functionality in Blender, it’s hard to know what each aspect is for in real-world situations. That’s not knocking Blender, just one tends to focus on certain aspects and sometimes, it’s how they interact that opens up the power of Blender. Shall take me a look at that, cheers.
Yep, mask modifier was just the job, thanks for that! 
Exactly, look at how many suggestions you were given. Then there can be confusion about masks, because masking exists in a few places in blender.
TBH, I’ve been away from blender a bit and I didn’t know the solution, until I read Hadriscus’s reply. Once I read his suggestion, I knew that was probably what you are looking for.
Best of luck!
Randy
You can position the parts of a bone exactly within your mesh. There is a snap to volume option in the snapping section of your toolbar, but you can have more control by selecting - for example - the loop of vertices around the knuckle and using shift+s to move the 3d cursor to selected.
The cursor will be positioned exactly at the centre of the loop. You can then select the armature, go into edit mode and, having selected the head or tail of the relevant bone, hit shift+s again, choosing the selected to cursor option.
Once again, an option I never even considered. I moved from Lightwave to Blender a while back and I am constantly surprised by just how many ways you can get the job done. Never tire of learning new stuff.