rigging question

Artwork Animations
1

First, how do i connect bones ends. sometimes they are not connected look at image
first image

second question do bones all have to be connected? i am rigging a fish and the bones are all connected but on the dorsal (back fin) Notice the dorsal bones are not connected Can i do this on Blender? look at another image i found on the net

digiman

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2

Hi digiman,

Bones can be connected or not, depending on how you’d like to animate them.
If your putting any ik in this fish rig, I’d say make that bone disconnected from
whatever its parent is.

If its all fk motion, I’d probably connect them all to maintain the volume of the fish.

To connect those two bones in the picture, press the child bone, then the parent and go Ctrl+P. Blender will ask you to Connect or Keep Offset, and ( you guessed it ) select Connect.

Hope that helps.

3

Actually taking a second glance at the picture of the fish rig, I’d connect all the bones,except the fins.
But, to maintain volumes, I’d lock off the Loc channels of those fin bones.

4

In the armature edit mode, there is a Con button in the bone settings that says whether the root of one bone is connected to the tail of its parent. It looks like you want to connect two heads though, and there is no way to do that except to Parent the one to the other, and then move their heads to the same spot.

5

Thanks that helps, just one more question How come those bones in the first picture are disconnected I extruded them form the root bone?

digiman

6

Maybe you clicked that button at some point and didn’t notice?

The bones in an armature have a mathematical relationship to one another which holds true regardless of where the bones actually are in 3D space. So, if you wanted a character whose hand was several feet beyond the end of his arm, you could do it.

It comes in very handy when I’m modeling machinery, because the moving parts of a machine are often separated by shafts and beams and such. But “the move as one,” and it is very nice to be able to ignore “physical reality” when describing such things to the computer.