about mhx bone shapes and colors

[Alessandro Padovani]

Since I see we’re working on mhx.

For performance reasons it is often necessary to turn off subdivision when posing a figure. In blender the common way to do this is to use the simplify panel that’s a global option for the whole viewport. Now it happens that with subdivision off some mhx shapes become “odd”, as the dented hands and feet.

That is, the bones shapes should not use subdivision so they stay the same with subdivision on and off.

As a minor note, since rigify is the standard for blender, making the shapes similar to rigify would probably make them easier for the blender user. edit. Or one could also just grab the shapes from rigify and use them for mhx.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

As another note, black is not a good color for bone shapes because it’s the same as wireframe. Below the face bones for rigify that tends to “disappear” in shaded wire. In this case any color would be better, may be yellow that’s the color for the rigify head.

Also, if possible, adding a bone group to rigify for the daz extra bones would allow the user to customize the colors. Or may be just add the bones to the “special” rigify group so they take the color from there.

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edit. As another note, rigify is using different colors for the various rig parts, but the selection colors are always the same that’s dark and bright cyan. This makes sense since selection is “independednt” from the rig parts. So may be mhx could do the same and use cyan for the selection color.

[Thomas Larsson]

The bone colors have been changed to something better. When looking at rigify I realized that you are not restricted to the predefined themes, which are quite limited.

I will have a look at the custom shapes. However, the wiggly shapes are on purpose and will remain in some way or another. I read long ago that a wiggly shape is good because it makes the bone visible from the side. This underlies the recent change in the ik target shapes. The ik foot is perfectly aligned with the z plane in rest pose, which made it invisible in orthographic view.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Commit 26695fc works fine.

Personally I'd had the selection always cyan both for primary and secondary selection, same colors as rigify. But I understand the mhx design is different and you may like different colors for the secondary selection.

This makes the selection less visible though in my opinion.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Please let me know what you think about the selection colors if having them different is on purpose. So I’ll mark as resolved.

edit. Since you already use cyan for right fk then may be bright and pale whites for selection will suit mhx better. While gray is not good because it merges with the geometry.

edit. As a side note may be we don’t need the colors in the mhx creation panel since the user can always change them after creation in the bone groups. But this is very minor and doesn’t harm anyway to have them in the creation panel too. Also to help newbies. I just wanted to point this out just in case.

[Thomas Larsson]

I don’t have a strong opinion about the colors. However, rigify’s colors for active and selected bones seem to be the same as Blender standard, so that is a good thing to copy.

The colors have been removed from the creation dialog. Presenting a lot of unnecessary information is not helping anybody.

[Alessandro Padovani]

commit 4a52450 works fine