Skeleton & Bones

The BONES tab generates and manages the underlying skeletal deformation rig for your mesh. Features both an intelligent Auto Bone Generator with adaptive curvature tracing and manual bone editing tools.

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1. Auto Bone Generator (Per Part)

Instead of manually placing joints in external software, Dynamic Wind Studio evaluates geometric topology directly in the viewport:

• Fit Modes:
  • Auto (Adaptive): Analyzes geometric thickness, taper, and directional curvature to automatically allocate higher joint density along bending arcs and fewer joints along straight spans.
  • Chains: Distributes linear sequential bone chains along elongated mesh branches (ideal for palm fronds, hanging vines, and cables).
  • Branching: Generates a unified hierarchical skeleton tree connecting parent trunks to child branches.
• Bone Style:
  • Relative (Recommended): You define the bone count on the longest chain. Shorter branches automatically receive proportionally fewer bones, preventing over-rigging of tiny twigs.
  • Absolute: Assigns an identical fixed bone count across all detected chains in the selected part.
• Attached End (Growth Origin):
  • Configures where bone chains start and how they orient: Near Parent, Bottom (−Z), Top (+Z), ±X, or ±Y.
• One Chain Per Island:
  • Forces each isolated geometry piece to receive exactly one dedicated bone chain.
• Skip Small Pieces:
  • Threshold slider to ignore micro-geometry fragments below a percentage of the largest piece.

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2. Grass Clump Optimization

Rigging every blade in dense ground cover or field grass creates hundreds of bones (often 400–800+ bones per patch), causing prohibitive CPU skinning and rendering overhead.

Dynamic Wind Studio solves this with Grass Clump Kinematics:

[ Dense Grass Patch (1,000+ Blades) ]
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1. Representative Blades (20-30 Chains) ──► PART: "Clumps" (Rigged with 2-3 bones each)
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2. Remaining 95% of Blades               ──► PART: "Foliage" (Follows "Clumps", [x] Grass enabled)
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3. Each blade automatically binds to the SINGLE nearest chain (No cross-stretching)
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4. Procedural Breakup Applied: W (Bend Curve) + Wd (Wind Variation) + S (Seed)

Clump Configuration Parameters

• W (Weight Variation, 0.0 – 1.0):
  • Injects per-blade bending variation. Individual blades bend slightly more or less than their followed bone chain, breaking up artificial uniform motion.
• Wd (Wind Dispersion, 0.0 – 1.0):
  • Adds per-chain wind phase and amplitude variation (±50% at 1.0), preventing the whole clump from moving like a solid block.
• S (Random Seed):
  • Shifts procedural noise patterns across adjacent patches.

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3. Manual Bone Editing (E) & Hierarchy Inspector

• Manual Bone Placement (E):
  • Press E in the viewport to click and place individual joints directly onto surface geometry.
  • Bind to Part Under Cursor: Automatically binds placed bones to whichever part lies beneath the crosshair.
  • Move Children with Bone: Toggle whether dragging a parent joint translates its entire sub-branch or isolates the single joint.
• Hierarchy Operations:
  • To Root: Re-parents selected bone directly to the skeletal root.
  • Move Up / Down: Reorders hierarchy level.
  • Weld: Merges adjacent joints within a tolerance radius.
  • Straighten: Aligns selected bone chain linearly between root and tip.
• Selected Bone Inspector:
  • Fine-tune bone translation coordinates, assigned part, and GPU simulation groups.
  • Wind Weight Tools: Quick assign 0.0, 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, or apply continuous mathematical distributions (Ramp 0→1, Arch 0→1→0, or Nudge).

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Next: 03. Weight Painting Studio Workflow →