Bone Tool

The bone tool is the tool of choice for preparing your virtual characters for that big Hollywood role. MOCCA was given an extra tool to let you put together your 3D star’s skeleton quickly and intuitively and easily position them in your scene. If you make a change to a bone, changes to its dependent bones will be made accordingly. It has never been easier to edit bones in CINEMA 4D.

With the bone tool, you can create and adjust bone chains quickly and easily, using a variety of tools.

Selecting and deselecting the bone tool

You’re probably wondering why we have a special section just for selecting a tool, even though its so obvious. Well, this section is less about actually selecting the tool and more about the effect that selecting this tool has, i.e. what happens to the bones when you select this tool or switch from it to another tool.

Selecting the bone tool is like beginning a phase – the bone editing phase. All bones in the scene are deactivated when the bone tool is selected. The red check marks in the object manager will turn from green to red.

Bones in the Object manager before selecting the bone tool.

Bones in the Object manager after selecting the bone tool.

In addition, the bones will be reset to their initial rest position and will lose their deformation effect on the mesh.

This effect is similar to the Reset Bones command in the Object manager.

A further effect of selecting the bone tool is that the Use Animation and Use Expressions options will be disabled. This will prevent the bones from being affected by animation keys or expressions.

As soon as you switch from the bone tool to another tool such as rotate, the bones will be reactivated automatically and the mesh will be influenced by the bones once again. The Use Animation and Use Expressions options will also be activated again.

If, before using the bone tool, you’ve edited the bones or recorded keys for them and so on, then when you switch from the bone tool to another tool the bones will jump back to the positions and rotations they had at the time when you selected the bone tool. In other words, you’ll lose any position and rotation changes that you’ve applied to the bones while the bone tool was selected.

Although selecting the bone tool can be compared to the Reset Bones command, deselecting the bone tool is not, in turn, similar to the Fix Bones command.

The difference is that Fix Bones fixes the bones to their present position and rotation and defines this as the new initial state, whereas deselecting the bone tool does not fix the bones — it simply activates their deformation properties.

Therefore we recommend that you edit the bones using the bone tool before applying expressions and so on. If you must make changes to the bones later using the bone tool, before you deselect the bone tool, choose the Fix Bones command to fix the bones in their new position and rotation.

Add Bone

This command adds a bone to the scene. The bone has a default length of 100 m and points in the direction of the Z‑axis. Pressing the button twice, however, does not add a child bone to the previous bone but another independent bone, with the same parameters as the first one. If you want to add a child bone, use the Add Child Bone button instead.

Add/Update Null-Bone

A Null bone is a bone without influence on the geometry of the object to which it is assigned. In other words, it is a bone with a strength of 0% and a length of 0 m — literally null.

Bones, just like any other object in a hierarchy, always work with the information of their parent object, such as its limits or positions. Null bones offer the benefit of not affecting the geometry and can therefore serve as a master system.

So why not use a normal Null object instead? The answer is simple: a bone chain does not allow other objects (such as the normal Null object) to penetrate its hierarchy. Otherwise, the bones might no longer be fixed and results would be quite unexpected.

The Add/Update Null Bone command adopts the rotation and position of and is placed at the origin of the selected bone. The rotation of the selected bone is cleared. The great advantage is that you can easily set rotation limits for non-rotated bones without having to do the math for each of them.

Use this command before Setup IK Chain, since the latter will fix the rest position of the bones. If the Null bone is added later on, the following bone cannot be placed at the tip of the shorter null bone, because it inherits the rest position. The chain would be elongated.

Add Child Bone

Clicking this button will simply add a child bone to the chain; this is placed at the tip of the previously created bone or child bone. It adopts the parameters of the preceding bone, as well as its name.

Continuously using this command will add a new child bone for every push of the button, quickly creating an entire chain.

You can also add child bones by Ctrl‑clicking in the viewport, in which case a new bone is added to the chain between the tip of the last bone and the position of the mouse pointer. If you look closely, you’ll notice a dot at the origin of each bone. These are handles. Drag them to scale and rotate the bones interactively in the viewport.

Bones can be set and edited interactively in the editor view using the bone tool.

Add Child Null Bone

Clicking this button will add a null bone to the selected bone’s tip (It will be a child bone of the selected bone).

Split Bone

This will split the bone in half. Together, the newly created bones will have the same length as the original. The overall length of the chain therefore remains unchanged. You can also split bones interactively in the viewport. While pressing the Shift key simply click on the bone at the point at which you want to split it.

Use this command before setting up Soft IK, since the Setup IK Chain command will also set the rest position of the bones. If you then split the bone, a new bone with half the length of the original will be placed at the previous origin. The other new bone will also be shorter but cannot reach the tip of the preceding bone, since the old rest position has also been copied. This would lead to gaps in the IK chain.

Bones fixieren

Has the same function as Fix Bones in the bone window (see also Bone-Object).

Reset Bones

Use this command to set the bones back to their initial state. Unfixed bones will be set back to their state prior to activation of the bone tool.