Make Bones - A Moho tool to split, clone or reform Bones

[SimplSam]

Make Bones is a Moho tool to split, clone or reform Moho Bones. To use - Select one or more Bones (normally one), then Activate and configure the tool. By default the tool will divide the length of the selected Bone into a {number of pieces} of equal lengths, parent the new bones to each other in a chain and re-assign prior child bones to the last bone in the newly created set.

The tool is primarily intended to be used at rigging & design time, but should cope with some limited pre-existing animation (reparenting and repositioning) if those elements of the selected bone and/or children have already been keyframed.


Options & Features:

• Set the No. of Pieces # that the selected bone should be broken into (or # clones)
• Use Parental Link to form a Parent-Child relationship with newly created bones
  • Chained: New bones are parentally linked back to the base bone
  • Shared: New bones share the same parent as the base bone (or none if base bone has none)
• Disable Parental Link to create the new bones with no parenting
• Rescale the selected Bone based on No. of Pieces, with a default simple Linear scale relation of 1/#
  • Use Weighted Bones to gradually reduce the new Bone sizes based on Fibonacci sequencing - where the length of the Parent is equal to the length of the Child + Grandchild … i.e. (8, 5, 3) or (89, 55, 34, 21)
  • Use Scale Strength to scale Bone strength in proportion to Bone size
• Disable Rescale to clone/duplicate the selected bone at full size # times
• Use Angle Offset to create curly wurly bones, or bones set at an angle (if not Chained in a Parental Link)
  • Use ReAngle First Bone - if you also want the base bone to have an angular offset
• Use Reset to restore default settings. OK to Apply settings & changes. Cancel to Cancel

• The color of the base bone is copied to the new bones
• New bones are auto-named based the name of the base bone (MH12+)
• Multiple selected bones will be processed in order
• The last used settings are automatically saved
• Compatible with AS11+
• Optimised for MH12+

* ‘base bone’ is the originally selected bone, which may itself be altered in size & rotation by the Split/Clone process

Available Now at:
- https://mohoscripts.com/script/ss_make_bones
- https://github.com/SimplSam/moho-make-b ... _bones.zip

[Greenlaw]

This tool looks very cool, SimplSam! Looking forward to trying it out later today.

Thanks for sharing it.

[DK]

Hey this tool is awesome SimplSam. Thank you for your time and generosity for sharing.
Cheers
D.K

[Lukas]

Thank you! Looks great. I’m sure this will be useful sometime

[Daxel]

Another user thanking you for sharing this (:

[funksmaname]

Sweet! Thanks for sharing

[Víctor Paredes]

Very interesting! I think it could have save us some time when we had to animate hundreds of chains in Wolfwalkers
Now, I'm intrigued about the use of the Fibonacci sequence. Have you thought about any specific use for it when working with bones? I'd love to see an example.

[SimplSam]

Very interesting! I think it could have save us some time when we had to animate hundreds of chains in Wolfwalkers

Hopefully you'll get a chance to use it in Wolfwalkers II ...

Now, I'm intrigued about the use of the Fibonacci sequence. Have you thought about any specific use for it when working with bones? I'd love to see an example.

The original goal of the tool was to simply split bones in two, but then a few more features popped-in during implementation.

For the Fibonacci part - I was really more focussed on a weighted bone structure, where the structure gets 'lighter' and more nimble as it extends; and Leonardo Bonacci (a.k.a filius Bonacci. a.k.a 'son of Bonacci') and his number sequeques came to the rescue.

Beyond that I envisaged the use in elements like tails and tentacles for making more natural curves, and used in combination with linear / manual bone sizing. It could even be used as a cheap ruler during design - just to get relative golden-rule spacings.

In the animated example below the first set is just a big bone broken into a series of 16 identical linear chained bones. In the second set, the big bone was first divided into 6 weighted fibo bones, then each fibo bone was subdivided into 4 linear bones. All bones were then animated by rotating +45 degrees and back.



There are some interesting discussions regarding Fibonacci in science, nature, animals and human body-parts. I have played around making 'pretty bones' - but no true animation as yet.

[Greenlaw]

This tool just came in handy! I had animated a bone chain for a tail using Sketch Bones and decided I really should have doubled the bones, but I didn't wish to start over from scratch.

Make Bones to the rescue! Make Bones doubled the bone chain with a single button click and more or less preserved my animation. I had to 're-sketch' my keyframes to smooth out the added joints but that was easy because I just traced over what I had previously 'sketch-boned'.

Thanks SimplSam, for creating such a useful tool and sharing it!

[hayasidist]

Oh! Dunno why I didn't see this thread before now... most interesting background on Fibonacci series in the human body as well as a useful script!