Hey everyone, in this tutorial we’re going to take a look at the Bone Manager and explore the different bone types in Character Creator 4. We’ll explore the different features of these bone types and what they’re used for. Let’s start off by going into the Bone Manager, which you can access from the Windows menu or by using the F3 hotkey. In the Bone Manager, you’ll see 3 buttons in the Viewport Bone Display section. Show Bone will display all of the bones of the character, while Show Unused Bones will display any unused bones. The third one is Bone Settings, where you can do things like adjust the bone color, size, and opacity. In the Bone Manager, you’ll see a list of all of your character’s bones. Clicking on one here will select the corresponding bone in the viewport. There’s also a search box at the top where you can quickly find the bone you’re looking for. To the left of your bone list, you’ll find filters that allow you to filter the types of bones displayed. There are a total of 7 bone types in Reallusion characters, each with a different purpose. Let’s take a look at Human IK bones first, which are the main bone type for humanoid characters and are used for body animation. All humanoid characters must have at least 15 HIK bones mapped to be functional. You can take a look at our humanoid character tutorials for more on bone mapping. Once your model has had its bones mapped and been defined as a humanoid character, it can then use any motion in the Reallusion library as well as all of the iClone motion tools. You can import motions from other sources as well, and any humanoid characters that have had bone mapping completed can all share those motions. Let’s look at the Facial bones next, which are, you guessed it, on the character’s face. Once a character’s bones have been mapped, CC4 will automatically define any child bones of the Head bone in the hierarchy as Facial bones. Let’s go out of Characterization mode briefly and take a look at the facial bone hierarchy in our list. You can see that all of them have a small head icon to indicate that they are part of the facial bone hierarchy. At the bottom, you’ll see the Facial set bone type is disabled as these bones are all already defined as Facial bones. Facial bones can be used separately or in combination with blend shapes to create character expressions and lip shapes. Facial animation tools include Face Key Editing, Face Puppet, AccuLips, and facial motion capture. You can check out courses.reallusion.com for related tutorials on each tool. It’s very important for accurate facial animation to define your character’s left and right eye bones accurately. If we enter into Proportion mode, I can select one of the eye bones and move it around to confirm that it indeed drives the character’s eyeball position and rotation. Let’s exit and go back to select Coyote_L_Eye from the list, then click the Left Eye under Set Bone Type. You’ll see the icon beside the bone name will then change to an eye icon. We can do the same for the right eye, and once we have them both defined, we’re good to go. Once those eyes are defined, we can utilize the Look At feature in iClone. iClone’s look at feature allows you to constrain your character’s gaze to any object in a scene. Just select Look At, and then choose any object or character in your scene. If you move that asset around, then the character’s eyes will follow it, also driving the head rotation as well. You can set the strength of the head follow vs. the eyeball follow, but that’s for another tutorial. Let’s look next at Used bones and Spring bones. All other bones aside from Human IK and facial bones will be defined as Used bones automatically. For example, you can see in the hierarchy that the character’s tail and finger bones are both defined as Used bone type. In iClone, we can use the Edit Motion Layer tool to animate the character’s Used bones. IK mode allows us to animate using inverse kinematics where the child bones or end effectors are typically used to drive the animation for body bones. We’ll have more detailed tutorials on that later. In FK, or forward kinematics mode, any adjustments you make to the parent bones will only affect the position and rotation of the child bones as you can see here, and is useful for animating Used bones. In iClone, Used bones are called Extend bones, which you can find as one of the sub-tracks of your main Motion track in the Timeline. Here you’ll see all of the Used bones listed under the Extend bones sub-track. One of the main uses for Used bones is to allow for spring effects on your character’s extremities. For more on how to set up spring effects on your Used bones, please consult the dedicated Spring Effect tutorial. If we go into Edit Spring mode, we can activate the Spring effect on each of the tail bones of our character, and you’ll see the icon change beside the bone name to indicate it is now a spring bone. It’s a super easy process, and once they’re properly defined, you can apply any animation to your character to see the results. Let’s take a look at our character’s ears now, which are currently defined as Facial bones. We can easily just select them from our bone hierarchy, and go down to set them as Used bone type, so we can make them a bit floppy. Used bone is the only bone type you can apply a spring effect to. Once we’ve done that, we can again enter into Spring mode and activate the spring effect on all those newly converted Used bones. Let’s look next at the Unused bone type. In this case, our pig character’s skirt accessory has a ton of bones that we don’t necessarily need to use. You can single or multi-select them and then define them as an Unused bone type at the bottom. Once you do, those bones will disappear from view as we don’t have Unused bones activated at the top in our Viewport Bone Display, and the icons indicating bone type will also changed to Unused. You can basically just follow this procedure to define all the bones that you don’t want to animate as Unused bone types. This will make the bone structure of the character cleaner and simpler, and therefore make it easier to animate. If you want to show your character’s Unused bones, you can simply choose to show them at the top Viewport Display mode. Now that we’ve defined a few different bone types, we can use the filter buttons to the left of the bone list to focus on one type of bone for future editing. That’s all there is to this introductory tutorial on the Bone Manager. Thanks for watching guys, and I’ll see you in the next video.
