Solved! Stick bone heads or tails don't show color when selected

[michaelws]

How do I get the head or the tail of a stick bone to show some color when it is selected?

Here are the tail ends of four selected bones in Octahedral form. Showing four bone tails selected;

Here they are in Stick form. All four are still selected but you cannot see anything visually showing that.

Where in Preferences>Themes can this be set or changed? Or can it?

When I delete a bone that has a parent, the head bone(s) of the new bones in the chain do show up as orange. I would like to be able to see any head or tails show up in color when selected.

Thanks for any help with this!

[DawnFilms (Ava)]

They should show up as yellow, so I believe it’s a bug.

If you’re able to though, maybe you could share the armature? Maybe there’s something you accidently switched off.

[michaelws]

Hi Dawn,
How do I share the armature?

[DawnFilms (Ava)]

Just drag and drop your .blend file into the reply composer.

It may be too large, and in that case you can upload your file to a sharing platform and paste the link here.

[revolt_randy]

In blender 4.0.2, if I select the tip of a bone in edit mode (like your first image) it’s orange. Changing to stick display of bones, and it’s still orange. Selecting the tail of the bone in edit mode, and it changes to orange too. Selecting the whole bone in edit mode, the bone turns yellow and the tip and tail are orange.

Try it with a new file, insert a single bone, change display to stick, and see if you get the same results as I did.

Also, what version of blender are you using?

Randy

[michaelws]

Revolt_randy, I am using 4.2. Here is a single bone in a new file. The entire bone is selected. The head is orange. the body and the tail are yellow.

Dawn, the full file with the dog’s body is over 12 megs. Can I send just the armature?

I might not need to send that file. The screenshot above, in reply to randy, is a new file with only one bone and it reacts the same way. When I select the tail of the bone, there is no color.

Thank you both for your replies.

[DawnFilms (Ava)]

@michaelws

Can I send just the armature?

Sure! That makes it easier to examine it as well.

[michaelws]

Blue_0815_24_Bones2Send.blend (2.4 MB)

[DawnFilms (Ava)]

That is strange, as it works perfectly for me. I’ll keep looking into it.

[michaelws]

Thanks Dawn. Maybe I should re-install 4.2.

Edited:

Well, I re-installed Blender. Turned off most addons but I still have the problem of the tail not highlighting in Stick mode.

Oh well!

[revolt_randy]

I looked at this a bit more this morning.

Looked thru user prefs → themes and didn’t see anything related to bones in edit mode. Lots of stuff in themes area, so maybe I over looked something.

Took a look at the bug tracker, set my browser to search for ‘bone’ and didn’t find anything related to bones in edit mode.

@DawnFilms are you using 4.2 too and it’s all working for you?

If so, then try this - on a windows machine look for this folder:

C:\Users\Randy\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\3.6\config

replacing ‘Randy’ with your user name for your computer, obviously.

In that folder there is a file called ‘userpref.blend’ - delete that file. That will delete any customization you’ve did to blender and would force blender to use default settings.

If this doesn’t solve it, maybe I can get some other users to look at this post…

Randy

[joseph (J)]

@revolt_randy

In that folder there is a file called ‘userpref.blend’ - delete that file.

Just make a backup copy first

[michaelws]

So I should be looking in the AppDate.… \4.2\config ?

Your link shows 3.6\config.

Thanks

[revolt_randy]

Yes, 4.2\config\userpref.blend

And @joseph advice is solid. Probably should just rename ‘userpref.blend’ to something like ‘temp-userpref.blend’, so blender won’t find the file. Then start blender and see if that fixes the problem. If not, then you can rename ‘temp-userpref.blend’ back to ‘userpref.blend’

Randy

[michaelws]

I tried different ways from your suggestions, none of which changed the result.

I deleted the config folder (saved a copy) completely. Another time I just changed the “userpref” to “temp-userpref.”

I clicked on the opening panel once where it said “Use 4.1 preferences.”

Nothing worked. The tail of the stick bone still shows no color when selected.

I opened up Blender 3.6 and it worked there. I opened Blender 4.1.1 and it also worked there.

So I don’t have a clue as to why it doesn’t in Blender 4.2

Thanks to all of you for trying to troubleshoot this for me!

[michaelws]

Blender 4.2.1 works fine. Great.

[revolt_randy]

Must have been a bug then that was fixed. I was going to suggest filing a bug report, but since I’m not running 4.2, I couldn’t verify that it’s a problem.

Glad it’s solved!

Randy