Joints in Maya can have arbitrary rotations as the base… the "bones " are really just connections between joints… which dont need to align with the joints. in blender if the bone is at 45 degrees that is it’s rest position too and you have bone roll… what this means is it’s easier to get joints to move and rotate how you want and you get less gimbal issues. You can even reverse the orientation for left and right so if you multiselect joints they rotate in a mirrored fashion!
Off topic but constraints in Maya do offsets easier and dare I say it more intuitively and if you set up an ik chain it has fk/ik blending built in so you don’t need to manually make 3 copies of the bone chain (ik, fk and actual deforming bones weighted between the two… i am not a c4d user but that is the difference betwern a joint system and a bone system
Ah, thank you. I never did much rigging with bone chains in Blender.
In Max it is similar to the way you describe it in Maya. I assumed it was the same in Blender.
In Max you can just use any kind of object (bones, empties, meshes… ) as joints. You simply parent whatever you want together and give it an IK solver.
yes , as explained Michael_W , you have better controls using the pivot points of the bones ( so ‘root’ and ‘tip’ ) . but you’re right , a bone is the inbetween/displayed part from a parent joint to his child one .
Hi, I’m not really a rig artist, but I have some interest in the subject. Exactly what is the difference between blender’s “Bendy Bones” and c4d’s Spline IKs. I always thought that the bendy bones were supposed to be a more advanced way of setting up complex curve-like deformations; after all, blender supports spline ik as well.
Supposedly there were going to be additional improvements to bendy bones (built in handles or something. I can’t remember), so maybe the key differences have yet to be coded.
I don’t know c4d spline Ik but I know maya and blender… From my experience the use cases are pretty similar between bendy bones and spline IK but they are also a bit like maya’s wire deformers.
Bendy bones are super simple to set up and are lovely. Spline Ik in blender and maya is much more fiddly to set up requiring hooks or clusters respectively to allow you to control the handles of your spline.
a key difference is with spline Ik you can stretch the spline longer than the chain so it’s nice in some ways for making things flow down the spline. Spline Ik in blender also doesn’t handle twist around the spline so I usually set up drivers for that.
Two problems I ran into with bendy bones is that if your mesh density is high the segments can be a bit blocky in how they interpolate the weighting.
second they can’t really be exported to game engines whereas spline ik chains are just a regular chain of bones so can be exported.
thx for your replies , I’ve just watched some Blender SplineIK tutorials ( I didn’t know blender had one ) .
In fact I remember the Daniel’ (Pepeland ) vids showing Bbones setup , and he was driving the pos/rotation by changing the XYZ/HPB values in the coordinates tabs which I found pretty hard to control
( @Michael_W thanks for pointing that those splineIKs don’t twist ! so it is pretty limited in that state . In C4D , the splineIK controls gives you the options to use/no use twisting , the joint axis wanted for twisting , the angles range +/- and the mode world or local for the twisting calculations …you can choose which target is affecting the twist too ( so for a bendy arm setup , you could have 5 targets , and only the root , mid and tip ones would affect the twisting ) of course we can reach some case where we have a +180°-180° flipping … ) .
In C4D ,we don’t have Bbones yes ! That looks great to be able to subdivide more or less on the fly the bone number I acknoledge !.. How the skinning deformation works in blender ? have you several modes ( linear / rotationnal / blended ? ) . I guess Bbones are there to ‘compensate’ a lack of those deformation modes no ? (only linear maybe ? ) so the more Bones you add the more the mesh keeps his volume ? In C4D you can choose among those 3 deformation modes ( linear / rotationnal / or a blend between the 2 ) and the rotationnal one gives you volume constant deformations
…so for a good curved area , only 2 ‘bones’ are needed (so 3 joints ) in that mode … no need to add 15 inbetween bones . ( I usually use a blended mode at 20% linear-80%rotationnal ) .
In the Blender SPline IK examples I see the guys use Bezier curves that’s it ? is it possible to have “Bspline” curves ? ( no tangent handles ) .
ha another question too : does the Blender shape keys / ‘pose morph’ , allows you to morph something else than vertex ?
in blender there are different deformation modes set on the armature (preserve volume radio button)
you can have a bendy arm with just two bones in blender (that is a bendy bone!) just increse the segments to what you want.
use the “easing” in and out sliders on the bendy bone to control which end gets the tension. It’s simple and works with fk for simplest setups and very powerful!
there’s also the corrective smooth modifier that does a great job of fixing deformations.
. I’ll check that .