Bendy Bone Handles not connecting correctly

I’ve been having this issue for a while and haven’t been able to find a solution and haven’t asked for explicit help yet so here I am lol

Basically whenever I create the classic bendy-bones-with-handles setup, it works well in some ways, but I can never get the start/end handle settings to work right.

For the setup I usually use where the bendy bones are all one long strand and there are just extra controls that pull them around but can’t rotate them because of the handles not working.

Recording 2024-06-11 at 14.03.53

On the left side in this recording is what I usually have, where the handles are just set to automatic. They bend as they should, but I can’t rotate them. The right side is just that but I have the handles set to absolute and with the relevant control bones selected. In the back is where I want to connect the loop, which I feel like should work if the handles worked, but the start of the bone won’t actually connect to the control bone for some reason. It only rotates.

This is what the bones look like in edit mode, if that helps:

Of course all the tutorials make the control bones a part of the chain, but disconnected, so I created a new version that does it like that, but it still doesn’t work:

Recording 2024-06-11 at 14.11.03

All bones are set to absolute with the start and ends set up, but as you can see it’s just like the end of the loop for the other one, where the bendy bones just don’t track to the previous bone at all. The Stretch To constraint does connect it to the later bone as it should, but it just doesn’t work with the previous one. I even tried reconnecting each main bone but of course that just made it all even worse.

Since every tutorial that pops up when I search “bendy bone handles” is just the basic setup with no extra help on how to fix issues I don’t know what to do. It does work when I just do one section of bones, but even the most simple setup still breaks for me, while it works perfectly for all the tutorial people.

So yeah, I don’t know what the issue could possibly be. It would be so much easier if there was a “Stretch Tail To” constraint or something that worked as consistently as the Stretch To constraint does.

I’m hoping that the fact that I haven’t got a response yet means that it’s a complex issue and I’m not just being dumb. Do still really need the solution tho

Found the solution at least to the second style of rig by accident: the issue was that the bend for each bone still needed to be fully connected to the previous control, a fact only passively mentioned in a single tutorial:

You’d think something fundamental to the whole rig working would be mentioned more clearly and in more places.


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