Speed Up Bone Creation With This Auto-Rigging Add-on For Blender

3D Artist and Blender add-on creator Blue Nile 3D has introduced Lazy Bones, a new and fast solution for creating bones and placing them when rigging. Started as a personal project, intended to assist in rigging a complex structure without placing bones by hand, this add-on is suitable for both beginner and advanced riggers, helping get a head start on bone placement before manually adjusting.

The author notes, that Lazy Bones excels at rigging complex shapes, and while it's quite a magical and powerful toolkit, it won't automatically create a perfect rig for any models you throw at it.

The core feature of Lazy Bones is the Edge-2-Bones function. Essentially, selected edges are turned into bones, while bone chains will attempt to point away from the 3D cursor for quick orientation. Bones can be decimated during creation, but more control can be given using Bone Clean.

Mesh-2-Edge, the experimental function, shrinks mesh into itself while the simulation plays. When you get results you like, hit Apply, and the simulation ends. It won't look too pretty yet, but that comes with Clean Up modifiers.

As Blue Nile 3D explains, Mesh-2-Edge is called experimental because the results with this feature are unpredictable. However, the tests have shown it works well with meshes that have "long" elements or a "flow" to them and struggles with ball-like objects.

When the simulation is applied, a number of Clean Up modifiers are added to the mesh:

Bone Doctor functions are designed to work from Object mode, without needing to select a single bone. Here are some of the options that will help you to fine-tune the rig:

• Bone Target (Whole) gets the average direction of all bones in an armature and attempts to point them all either toward or away from the 3D cursor, useful for the Mesh-2-Edge Sim as it creates multiple separate armature chains
• Bone Target (Individual) points each bone in the armature either toward or away from the 3D cursor, which is great for rigging face loops or abstract shapes
• World Space Symmetrize creates symmetry naming for bones based on their position on the X-axis. The selected armatures are then symmetrized
• Dissolve By dissolves every N-th bone, perfect for quickly decimating an armature in half

Here's the typical workflow with Lazy Bones:

1. Simulate a basic "skeleton" of edges using Mesh-2-Edges
2. Use Clean Up to snap verts to center, remove small edges, resample edge lengths, and remove edge intersections, apply these fixes.
3. Select all edges in Edit mode and convert the edges to bones with one click
4. Use the Bone Doctor tools to set bone rolls, bone directions and symmetrize, all from Object mode
5. Refine bone placement manually

If you wish to use Lattice, there's a one-click function to convert a lattice to edges, then you can use Edge-2-Bone to give the lattice bones.

Lazy Bones's interface is context-sensitive and some features only appear when they can be used, as the developer wanted to avoid cluttering the panel. For example, Edge-2-Bone will only appear on the right-click menu when in Edge Select mode of Edit mode, or Mesh-2-Edge Simulation appears on the right-click menu when a mesh is selected in Object mode.

This add-on is compatible with Blender 3.6 and above and is available at Blender Market at $13.

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