WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.010 --> 00:00:06.960 Armatures, or skeletons, can be very powerful, but they can also get very messy. 2 00:00:06.960 --> 00:00:12.680 If you have a very complex rig, with different deformed bones, controllers, constraint specific 3 00:00:12.680 --> 00:00:18.480 bones, etc. etc., you'll want to start hiding certain bones or selectively viewing others 4 00:00:18.480 --> 00:00:22.600 so that you only see the bones you need at any given moment. 5 00:00:22.600 --> 00:00:25.500 This is where bone layers come into play. 6 00:00:25.500 --> 00:00:30.460 Instead of manually hiding and unhiding bones as you work, you can actually place bones 7 00:00:30.460 --> 00:00:35.420 in certain bone layers within your armature, allowing you to selectively view any given 8 00:00:35.420 --> 00:00:38.660 bone layer or layers at any time. 9 00:00:38.660 --> 00:00:44.660 This works differently from collections as there is a maximum of 32 layers, but oftentimes 10 00:00:44.660 --> 00:00:46.900 that is more than enough. 11 00:00:46.900 --> 00:00:51.060 I'm going to demonstrate bone layers on a simple rig, but just remember bone layers 12 00:00:51.060 --> 00:00:57.220 are most often used on complex rigs where organization is necessary for clarity. 13 00:00:57.220 --> 00:01:02.220 We can see the bone layers visually in the armature properties tab in our properties editor. 14 00:01:02.220 --> 00:01:05.900 This tab is indicated by a green stick figure icon. 15 00:01:05.900 --> 00:01:12.220 Once there, you can see this horizontal grid-like pattern which represents our bone layers. 16 00:01:12.220 --> 00:01:17.540 You don't have to count them, but there are 32 squares displayed here horizontally. 17 00:01:17.540 --> 00:01:22.260 The other 32 squares you see right below the layer section is for selecting which layers 18 00:01:22.260 --> 00:01:25.820 from above will be considered protected layers. 19 00:01:25.820 --> 00:01:29.900 They're technically still referencing the same 32 layers we see up here, but we'll 20 00:01:29.900 --> 00:01:32.780 come back to this section later. 21 00:01:32.780 --> 00:01:37.380 Clicking on a square in the grid will enable that layer exclusively, hiding all bones on 22 00:01:37.380 --> 00:01:39.820 all other bone layers. 23 00:01:39.820 --> 00:01:44.700 Holding shift and left clicking on another square will allow you to toggle on or off 24 00:01:44.700 --> 00:01:47.380 multiple bone layers at a time. 25 00:01:47.380 --> 00:01:51.980 You might notice that the first square here has a small white dot in the middle. 26 00:01:51.980 --> 00:01:57.020 This represents the fact that there are bones within that layer, and typically enabling 27 00:01:57.020 --> 00:01:59.780 that layer will make these bones visible. 28 00:01:59.780 --> 00:02:05.620 By default, our bones exist on our first layer, and our first layer is already enabled. 29 00:02:05.620 --> 00:02:09.140 Now that you understand that, let's get to organizing. 30 00:02:09.140 --> 00:02:13.700 You can choose to organize your bones however you want, but let's say for our sake, we 31 00:02:13.700 --> 00:02:19.300 want to simply move our bones of each limb in our rig to separate layers, while still 32 00:02:19.300 --> 00:02:23.020 keeping the rest of the rig in the first default layer. 33 00:02:23.020 --> 00:02:28.580 So to accomplish this, we'll need 5 layers total, including our first layer. 34 00:02:28.580 --> 00:02:33.700 Let's choose 5 layers that'll make sense visually in our bone layer's grid pattern. 35 00:02:33.700 --> 00:02:39.620 I'm going to choose these two for our left and right arm bones, and these two for our 36 00:02:39.620 --> 00:02:42.500 left and right leg bones. 37 00:02:42.500 --> 00:02:47.940 This way, I know that the top layer is generally for left hand side bones, and the bottom layer 38 00:02:47.940 --> 00:02:50.500 is for right hand side bones. 39 00:02:50.500 --> 00:02:54.260 Now let's move our bones where they need to go. 40 00:02:54.260 --> 00:02:57.620 I'm going to start with the left arm bones. 41 00:02:57.620 --> 00:03:02.820 To move our bones to a different bone layer, simply go into Pose mode, select the bones 42 00:03:02.820 --> 00:03:07.900 you want to move, and go to the Pose menu at the top left of our viewport. 43 00:03:07.900 --> 00:03:11.680 You can then select Change Bone Layer. 44 00:03:11.680 --> 00:03:16.680 This will pop up a menu that looks exactly like our layer grid that we saw in our Properties 45 00:03:16.680 --> 00:03:18.080 Editor. 46 00:03:18.080 --> 00:03:23.000 For hotkey users, simply hover over anywhere in the viewport and press the M key as in 47 00:03:23.000 --> 00:03:26.760 Move to bring up the same layer menu. 48 00:03:26.760 --> 00:03:31.400 Now you can simply select the layer or layers you would like your selected bones to reside 49 00:03:31.400 --> 00:03:32.880 in. 50 00:03:32.880 --> 00:03:38.960 For the left arm bones, we decided to place them here in the second layer of the top row. 51 00:03:38.960 --> 00:03:42.880 Once we do that, you can see that our bones have disappeared from our viewport as they 52 00:03:42.880 --> 00:03:49.000 are now hidden in the second bone layer, while we still only have the first bone layer enabled. 53 00:03:49.000 --> 00:03:58.480 Let's repeat this process for our other limbs. 54 00:03:58.480 --> 00:04:03.440 Now that we have our bones in the right layers, we can select these layers with left click 55 00:04:03.440 --> 00:04:08.400 to see each limb's bones independently or shift select to enable multiple bone layers 56 00:04:08.400 --> 00:04:09.680 at a time. 57 00:04:09.680 --> 00:04:14.280 You may have already noticed that only one square in the grid pattern actually has a 58 00:04:14.280 --> 00:04:19.200 filled white dot while the others have a hollow white dot. 59 00:04:19.200 --> 00:04:25.320 The filled in white dot simply indicates which layer your last selected bone or active bone 60 00:04:25.320 --> 00:04:31.320 is on, while the hollow white dots simply indicate that there are bones present in that 61 00:04:31.320 --> 00:04:32.600 layer. 62 00:04:32.600 --> 00:04:37.280 And those are the basics of bone layers, but we haven't touched on what this Protected 63 00:04:37.280 --> 00:04:39.800 Layers section does exactly. 64 00:04:39.800 --> 00:04:44.560 For most beginners, you probably won't have to touch these settings, as they refer specifically 65 00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:50.360 to when the rig is imported into other blender files and referenced as a proxy. 66 00:04:50.360 --> 00:04:54.760 Protecting a layer tells proxy rigs of the source that bones on that layer should prioritize 67 00:04:54.760 --> 00:05:00.680 and reference the original data from the source file if the source changes. 68 00:05:00.680 --> 00:05:06.280 Referencing files is most common in studio environments or group productions. 69 00:05:06.280 --> 00:05:12.800 And those are the fundamentals for bone layers, but for further organization, I also recommend 70 00:05:12.800 --> 00:05:14.720 Bone Groups. 71 00:05:14.720 --> 00:05:15.720 What are Bone Groups? 72 00:05:15.720 --> 00:05:18.840 Well, let me just show you real quick. 73 00:05:18.840 --> 00:05:22.640 Bone Groups can be edited right below the bone layers in the armature properties of 74 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:24.840 our Properties Editor. 75 00:05:24.840 --> 00:05:28.800 Expand that and you'll see a very familiar interface if you've worked with vertex groups 76 00:05:28.800 --> 00:05:30.560 already. 77 00:05:30.560 --> 00:05:35.160 To create a new bone group, simply press the plus key. 78 00:05:35.160 --> 00:05:39.480 Before left clicking a group will allow you to rename the group to whatever you want. 79 00:05:39.480 --> 00:05:42.280 I'm going to call this Left. 80 00:05:42.280 --> 00:05:46.720 And now, since you probably know what I'm going to do, let's create another group called 81 00:05:46.720 --> 00:05:48.080 Right. 82 00:05:48.080 --> 00:05:52.180 We can add bones to whatever group we have selected in this list by simply going into 83 00:05:52.180 --> 00:05:57.720 Pose Mode, selecting what bones we want, and clicking the Assign button in the Bone Groups 84 00:05:57.720 --> 00:06:00.200 interface in our armature properties. 85 00:06:00.200 --> 00:06:05.040 I'm going to go ahead and organize these bones so that the left hand side bones are assigned 86 00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:10.080 to the left group and the right hand side bones are assigned to the right group. 87 00:06:10.080 --> 00:06:17.280 Okay, now that I've done that, let's go ahead and deselect everything with Alt A. 88 00:06:17.280 --> 00:06:21.440 Now what's great about Bone Groups is that we can very easily select or deselect bones 89 00:06:21.440 --> 00:06:27.240 in that group by selecting the group in that list and clicking the Select or Deselect buttons 90 00:06:27.240 --> 00:06:28.700 here. 91 00:06:28.700 --> 00:06:34.240 But another great benefit of Bone Groups is colors for visual clarity. 92 00:06:34.240 --> 00:06:38.960 What I love to do, for example, is to mark our left hand side bones as red and our right 93 00:06:38.960 --> 00:06:41.400 hand side bones as blue. 94 00:06:41.400 --> 00:06:42.400 How do we do this? 95 00:06:42.400 --> 00:06:47.020 Well, you can simply select our left group and go to the Color dropdown below. 96 00:06:47.020 --> 00:06:51.720 From this, we can select a color set that matches what we want, or we can create a custom 97 00:06:51.720 --> 00:06:53.200 color set. 98 00:06:53.200 --> 00:06:57.880 When setting custom colors, you can read more about what each color is used for by hovering 99 00:06:57.880 --> 00:07:00.900 over each colored rectangle. 100 00:07:00.900 --> 00:07:04.420 Let's do the same thing for the right group. 101 00:07:04.420 --> 00:07:10.100 Now we have this very colorful rig that helps us and whoever animates with this rig understand 102 00:07:10.100 --> 00:07:13.820 at a glance which bones belong to which groups. 103 00:07:13.820 --> 00:07:20.180 Important note, unlike vertex groups, bones can only belong to one bone group at a time. 104 00:07:20.180 --> 00:07:24.860 I hope you find these tools useful for understanding and organizing the bones within your rigs.