Mesh To Bone Shape

When rigging, you usually want to add custom shapes to your bone controllers. It helps to simplify the selection of these bones and moreover it gives information to help the animator to understand quickly what a bone can do. In Blender, the default procedure can be really tedious so we have created a script to help handle adding and editing custom shapes to bones.

Usually, to add a custom shape to a bone, you have to do it in the bone tab in the properties panel and activate wireframe display, the bone is replaced by the shape which is resized according to the bone length, then you pretty often have to edit the shape to rescale and reposition your shape, without a direct overview of your modification.

The addon handles all these steps for you, with your shape created and well placed where you have initially chosen. With the addon installed, the tool named “Mesh To Bone Shape” appears in the Tools Shelf. The button with the same name calls the operator to execute these actions.

We have also added an edit function to modify the shape directly on the bone which you can see on the following video.

Here is an other example with a faceted mesh.

Note that it will create objects named “WGT-bone.name” in the last layer at the origin.

The tool is available on our github
Proog – CC-BY Blender Foundation