An In-Depth Look at How B-Bones Work - Including Details of the New Bendy Bones

Here's a breakdown of how the B-Bones in Blender work (including the new Bendy Bones stuff - see the other post in this series, which focusses more on the features themselves). I'm writing these notes up mainly so that I have something to refer to again in the future, if/when I need to do further work on this stuff. It took me a little while to figure out how some of this magic all fits together. However, now that I've figured this out, it turns out that it's quite easy to see all the extension points that this system has for adding interesting + useful features quite easily in fact. Therefore, before I forget about all this again, here we go!

BTW, all the diagrams within were done using Grease Pencil :)

Bendy Bones Dev Update

It's been a busy few months since I first announced that I was working on bringing Pepeland's Improved Bendy Bones to Blender. After being tied up with many other projects for the past few months, I just spent the weekend having a fun hackathon to get this functionality polished up and ready for general use in Blender proper. Along the way, I've also added a few cool new features, which really take B-Bones to the next level! Here's a sneak peak of some of these in action!

In each of these screenshots, you're seeing just a single B-Bone - no hidden stuff, no tricks. Just a single B-Bone...

UPDATE: It's now in master! (After a little fight with git to let me merge the branch successfully...) Woohoo!

Dev Experiments - Pepeland's Improved Bendy Bones

Over the weekend, I've been doing some experiments with the bendy bone improvements patch (original code by Jose Molina) that pepeland demoed at BConf15. To remind you of what this is about, here's are a few screenshots of the patch in action:

Three bones showing off how the bendy bone settings work: 1) Curve X/Y properties, 2) Scale In/Out, 3) Roll In/Out

Each coloured segment is a single bone

EDIT: Just to clarify any confusion, this is NOT Pose Sculpting. That is a separate project. See this instead for the latest updates.