why does the bounding box suddenly misalign to the object after rigging?

tmtmtm_f56c8d4bda

I have a simple object I'm rigging. I'm at figure setup tab, import obj, drag it onto geometry, and have my default bones set up. I click Create and see my object and its bounding box aligned as I expect.

 

After fiddling with bones and weight maps for a bit, I align my bones, memorize rigging, and save.

 

Now, oddly, the bounding box of the obect is totally random, like 40 degrees twisted and 70 degrees turned, like nothing along my bones, it's totally random looking.

 

No idea what I'm doing wrong - i'ts driving me crazy because now the universal tool sets a bizarrely positioned and rotated origin point for the prop.

 

Any idea what's casing this?

tmtmtm_f56c8d4bda

After some fiddling I think this is what happens:

 

1. the start point of the object sets the pivot point - oddly, the UI does not show a bone for the top level object (even though it's essentially like a root bone)
2. the topmost child bone will snap to the root "bone" end point if you chose this with the child bone selected
3. If your root "bone" endpoints are anywhere else than the desired start point of teh topmost child bone, things go haywire

I guess that makes some sense - I wish DS would draw a bone ghost image or something for the object... ah well.

tmtmtm_f56c8d4bda

Couple more notes from my newfound understanding, for the record and indexing benefit to others:

Moving the start/endpoints around doesnt do much to the bone visual until you memorize the rigging. Aligning the bone to endpoints has an effect on rotational behavior. A feature missing from DS is the ability to rotate the bone axis (green circle): you can set the rotation of the whole bone, but not the start point. This has a limiting effect on what you can do with custom rontatinoal behavior.

Personally, I wish bones would automatically snap to their end points and automatically memorize, so I can always see what's happening - I'm struggling with having to distinguish memorized bones from the ones I just changed, and dont understand why I have to "memorize" just  so I can see actual bones - this would be more intuitive to me if memorizing the riging is something that happens on save.

Richard Haseltine

The figure isn't a bone - it owns the geometry and the rig (the bones and weight maps) but is not itself either.