Bone Occlusion

[yo_johann]

I needed to add another small bone to get the axis right on my rig. It’s completely obscured by the bone above it. Is there any way to make the fat part of the top bone smaller? Or do I need to toggle my visibility?

[FedPete]

I can’t say anything about the structure of these bones. if you need them, yuo create them.

But it not necessary to have bones connect like your example.

You can change the shape of a the armature (bones). Or even design your own bone shape.

[yo_johann]

Thanks. I need an axis on the bottom of my lower arm. It’s possible I don’t need the top bone running the length of my arm but going without it seems odd to me.

[yo_johann]

For reference, this is what I am trying to solve.

[FedPete]

I’ve seen a youtube movie about this subject.

[yo_johann]

It’s looking a lot better. Is there a way to parent or link tails together?

[FedPete]

I think the solution is to use bone constrains. One bone is the master, the other just follows, (copy movement).

[yo_johann]

Amazing. Thank you.

[yo_johann]

After playing around with it for a long time I ended up with these constraints. I’m not really sure why, but all axis’s rotate the way I want them to, including around the stem.

[FedPete]

I never tried this arm bone construction. But I know it’s tough.
Mistakes are easily made.
I glad you’ve reached this point!

[Marc_Carlyon]

Great job guys!
It may help when you complete this section if you are interested in animation to try our characters course and also maybe look at some more complex rigs (I think theres an insect one on udemy that i was looking at either by julien deville or more like darrin lyle)

[Jaco_Pretorius]

For these types of setups you can use a copy-rotation if every joint in the setup forms perfect parallelograms, otherwise the 1-chain-IK-followers around a “fake” IK setup is your best bet.
I did a crazy IK setup that was not perfect parallelograms… took me a couple of weeks and trips into very technical sites to figure it out
Shared some findings here:

IK limits

Thanks for the advice and sorry for the late response. I’m hoping to finish off the Lamp section soon but still having fun with exporting… (This week’s problem ) I used your advice to create the auto-keyframed animation here: There were still artifacts where the arm bones would go out-of sync with the lower hinge bolts because in my reference the lower arms do not form a perfect parallelogram so the rotation limit got noticeably wrong at the extremes. Got a little obsesse…

From this experience, my advice is to just keep things parallel even if it doesn’t follow your reference perfectly. You can figure out the advanced IK stuff once you’re comfortable with the basics.

[yo_johann]

The two parts of the arm are parallel on the y-axis at rest position. The trick is keeping them parallel when rotating around the base, which is why I needed two copy rotation modifiers rather than copy transform.