Bendy bone handles

Edit: Forgot to add link to github https://github.com/gnastacast/bendy_bone_handles

Yet another blender add-on to add a new bendy bone object with handles. Several these have been made, most don’t work with 2.8 any more. This one does. It adds a bendy bone as a new object in the same way you would add an armature. Support coming soon for being able to add handled bendy bones into existing armatures in edit mode. For now just arrange them and join them in as you go. Tested with 2.80 and 2.81. Includes all the drivers needed for scaling both ends of the curve and changing the weight of each handle sort of like a bezier. The last version I saw of this was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYs3En7ihL0 but now it says DO NOT BUY right on the site so I made another.

Here is a video of it working

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Update: Applying the pose now behaves as expected. You will still have to reset the length on the ‘Stretch To’ constraint but the drivers update correctly.

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WOW! Thank you so much for sharing, going to test this out this week.

Thank you very much for this great addon

This should be implemented into master!
Even like curve handles with ability to switch between aligned/free/auto/symmetric aligned

Hi!

What is the procedure to make this setup scalable?

I’ll look into this today. I have an idea of how to fix it, I just have to make sure it doesn’t break other setups.

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Its seems the problem comes from “bone”, which Inherit Scale is set to “None”.
I get you did that to avoid double transform since scaling of “head” is used to drive Scale Y/X and Ease In/Out of Bendy Bones “bone” channels but doing so makes me wonder how to construct a working hierarchy using this setup.

The solution i came up with on my side was to add 2 extra bones to drive each “head” and “tail” bones using location and rotation constraints. I used them also to drive the Bendy Bones Scale and Ease attributes. Maybe there are better ways than using rotation and location constraints but i’m super noob in blender.
I tried using Animation nodes but the expression node i was trying to use was making Blender crash…
Also i don’t know how to drive rotation channels since theire is so much to connect (0quaterion, all eulers , idk…)

I made some changes to the code. Thanks for the tip. It took a while to sort out because it’s more of a design decision, but I think you were right to raise it as an issue. Basically you can now simply parent the two handle bones to any other bone and the scaling should work as expected. Let me know if you like this change. It’s a little subjective so I’d love more feedback.

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I removed the old version using “remove” button on the “Add-ons” section of the Blender preferences and downloaded the new one (still named 1.0?).

I tried but it seems to be the same as before, maybe i did something wrong but here’s the (same) result:

Sorry, I had to revert the change. It breaks when you scale the object. I’ll make a branch on github so you can play with it, but I don’t think it will make it into master. https://github.com/gnastacast/bendy_bone_handles/blob/ffc6da3fe7413dfef02370788de8db96936e0dee/init.py Here is the init.py with the changes that you can play with. I’ll keep working on it over the next couple days, but it may be a limitation in what is exposed to the driver.

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No problem, thanks for trying!