This seems to be a compatibility issue between Mac and Windows reading of rigs; we’re both using Blender 4.0.2.
I have a Windows laptop and rigged characters in Blender the usual way, saving time by setting up one side of the rig with appropriate .L or .R suffixes before symmetrizing to get their opposites.
The rigs work great for me! But today I learned my creative director on this project, who has a Mac, can’t select many of the bones created by symmetrization.
Visually, all of the bones originating that way are nothing but outlines on his machine when he enters pose mode.
That includes the ones I’ve highlighted here in a screenshot from mine–when rigging I started by making the left side of the rig, aside from the face where I started with the right eye, and the controller of the eyelids to the character’s left was made by duplicating its left pairs of eyelid bones, already affected by whatever happened in symmetrizing.
On my machine, the custom bone shapes do look like only outlines from whichever side is a back face, but on his the affected bones have no front face anywhere.
He’s not able to individually select many of the outline-only bones (some adjustment bones on the same side in another bone collection seemed to box select okay). But it’s not just requiring precision like if it were only edges–he demonstrated on the shoulder cluster that he can’t box select over them unless he first selects the horizontal circle for the jaw, which should have no hierarchical relationship to the shoulder, and then he can click and drag to box select over one of them and they all get selected. He can’t, in the viewport in pose mode, select only one shoulder bone let alone without also selecting the jaw bone.
[The relationship between the jaw and the right shoulder–you have to go back to the torso bone to connect them. And again the left shoulder, between them in the outliner, has no problem.]
He can select the bones individually from the outliner still and that’s his current workaround, but I made the rig and named the bones and would still hate to do that.
- The working bones and the faulty ones are in the same bone collections, not split by side, and all the constraint relationships between bones across collections seem correct.
- He disabled every vaguely rigging related add-on he’d installed and restarted blender, with no change.
- We also checked if anything changed by adding a duplicate of the circle mesh with flipped normals just below it in that custom bone shape object. It was double the outlines but still no visible faces and just as impossible for him to select on the bones with trouble.
I can’t find record of anyone with even a slightly similar issue and I don’t have a lot of faith that I can dig out my ancient macbook to reproduce it.
Is there some kind of flag Blender leaves on a bone spawned by symmetrization that I could try clearing to see if that will let the MacOS build treat it like any other bone? Can you think of any other tangential setting that would change the way the bones are read?