Bone Mirror

With this tool you can mirror individual bones and entire chains including tags, Claude Bonet maps and much more.

The bone mirror tool is a powerful accessory that can speed up your work with bones by mirroring not only the bones but also tags, constraints, selections and more. To select the bone mirror tool, choose Plugins > MOCCA > Bone Mirror or select the Bone Mirror icon from the MOCCA palette. In both cases, this opens the Bone Mirror dialog, from where you can set up the operation of the tool, before clicking the Mirror button to make the changes.

The bone mirror tool mirrors only the bones and the Null objects within the setup (such as nulls for root goals), NOT geometry (meaning 3D volumes). If you want to mirror geometry, use the Mirror tool from the Structure menu.

Since the Bone Mirror tool was developed primarily for use with Soft IK it does not support other functions such as IK expressions or XPresso expressions.

Before using the bone mirror tool…

…and after applying the bone mirror tool - just a few clicks later!

Attribute Manager settings

Plane

This is where you select the plane onto which the setup is mirrored. Imagine putting half an orange onto a mirror, open side facing the mirror. The half orange suddenly appears like a complete one. The mirror is the equivalent of the tool’s plane that you choose from this drop‑down list.

Origin

The Origin setting defines a point through which the Plane should pass, thus defining the mirror’s position. Choose one of the following settings.

Selection

This will mirror the selected bone with the mirror plane passing through its object axis. The rotation of the axis will be ignored, since the bone mirror tool always mirrors parallel to the plane that you have chosen.

Parent

The setup will be mirrored according to the position of the axis of the selected bone’s parent. Again, the rotation of the axis will be ignored, since the bone mirror tool always mirrors parallel to the plane that you have chosen.

Top Most

In this case, the root bone sets the origin of the mirror. Here too, only the mirror plane is of importance.

World

If you choose the World setting, the origin of the world coordinates will be used, regardless of the rotation of origin.

Auto Find Center, Match Search

The Auto Find Center option is designed to help you mirror Claude Bonet maps, point and polygon selections, as well as vertex maps. Imagine having built a character and set up half of it with bones. You might also have set the range of influence of some of the bones with the Claude Bonet tool. Naturally, you’ll want the bone mirror tool to copy those weights properly to the other side, too.

If you disable the Auto Find Center option, the object axis of the bone setup will be used instead. The object axis isn’t necessarily at the center of your character’s points, though. Enabling the option will find the center of the points, which can create very accurate results in symmetrical models.

The Match Search box is where you set an amount of tolerance with which the bone mirror tool will compensate for irregularities within the model. If the bone mirror tool does not find exactly the same corresponding points on the other side of the setup, it will search for them within the radius that you can set. You should experiment with this setting. Very small values tend to produce unconvincing results.

Suffix

Here you can set a name suffix that is added to the mirrored elements. This serves for organizational purposes, avoiding confusion between the various resulting bones. If you are mirroring the left half of the character, you might set the suffix to ‘_R’. An upper thigh named ‘ThighUp’ would, after mirroring, create a bone with the name ‘ThighUp_R’ on the right side.

Prefix

This is where you can set a prefix to be added in front of the mirrored bones. Taking the previous example (see ‘Suffix’, above), setting the prefix to ‘R_’ will cause the right side of the upper thigh to be named ‘R_ThighUp’ after mirroring.

Replace...with

These settings enable you to rename a bone while mirroring. For example, if you have already named a left upper thigh ‘ThighUp_L’, it would make little sense to leave ‘_L’ in the name of the right side. Simply type _L into the Replace box and _R into the With box. The mirrored bone will automatically be named ‘ThighUp_R’.

Clone Tags

You can also mirror all the tags assigned to a bone element by enabling this option. Note that the Mirror Constraints and Mirror Influences options are available only when Clone Tags is enabled.

Clone Animation

If this option is enabled, the chain’s existing animation tracks are cloned.

Mirror Children

When enabled, this option will mirror the children of the selected bone, as well as any control objects. If the option is disabled, only the selected bone will be mirrored.

Mirror Constraints

If this option is enabled, existing Restriction tags and the constraints defined in the Attribute manager will be mirrored as well.

These restrictions are used to control which part of the body the bone may deform. Even combined vertex maps with parented polygon models can be mirrored, despite the fact that the vertex map is not assigned to the bone, but to the Polygon object above it. The only necessary condition is that the Mirror Influences option is enabled.

Mirror Influences

When enabled, this option will mirror all influences a bone may have on a model. These influences can refer to Restriction tags assigned to point or polygon selections as well as to vertex maps. This option is especially useful when mirroring Claude Bonet weighting.