Better Shape Bone, step by step

Install it, generate your first shapes, and learn what every panel, setting and button does. If you only read one section, read Quick start: the rest is refinement.

Install

1. In Blender 5.0 or newer, open Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Get Extensions ▸ ▾ ▸ Install from Disk.
2. Pick better_shape_bone-x.y.z.zip.
3. Blender asks for file access. Allow it: the add-on keeps your shape library on disk.
4. Select an armature and enter Pose Mode. Open the sidebar with N and choose the Better Shape Bone tab.

Updating from an earlier 1.x version: install over it. Your shape library is kept.

Your first shapes

1. In Pose Mode, select the bones you want shapes for (A selects all).
2. Press Generate Shapes. Every selected bone gets a shape built from the mesh it drives.
3. Press F9 to nudge what you just made: offset, rotation and scale, live.

Where everything is

Everything lives in one sidebar tab and appears only in Pose Mode. Four panels, top to bottom:

Before anything is drawn, the add-on works out which geometry belongs to each bone. It looks in three places:

If a bone owns nothing at all, it gets a fallback shape (a ring or a box) instead of failing.

Every bone remembers how its shape was made

How each shape was generated is stored on the bone itself, not on the widget object. That is why Refit keeps working after you delete the widget, replace it by hand or swap it for a library shape. Change the model under a finished rig, press Refit, and every bone is rebuilt the way it was originally made.

Select bones, press Generate Shapes. Each shape follows the geometry its bone drives.

Mode

Silhouette

Mesh

Silhouette settings

Mesh settings

Shared settings

Buttons

Colour By Collection

Assign a palette per bone collection, then apply to all of them at once. Useful on character rigs where the collections already separate FK, IK and deform.

Advanced

Set once per project, not per shape.

Output

Built-in shapes and your own sit in the same grid and are applied the same way.

A grid of thumbnails. Use Category to browse folders; All shows everything at once.

Two ways to place a shape

Fit choices

With Fit To Part, choose how the shape is fitted:

Placement settings

Library actions

Empty categories are removed automatically: a category with nothing in it is not a category.

Everything here works on the bone under the cursor.

Edit Shape Mesh

Opens the widget’s own vertices exactly where the shape is drawn, with the character around it, so you never edit blind.

1. Press Edit Shape Mesh. You land in Edit Mode on the widget, positioned on the bone.
2. Move vertices however you like.
3. Press Tab, or the Finish Editing button in the panel that appears.

You come back to Pose Mode with the same bone active and the edit on the shape.

• If the widget is shared by several bones, this bone gets its own copy first and the report says so. The other bones are untouched.
• The session survives saving and reopening the file. If you come back to a widget parked on a bone, press Finish Editing to put it away.

Copy Shape To Selected

Select the bones, make the bone with the shape you want active, then copy. Size in the F9 panel decides what happens:

A copied bone remembers where it came from, so Refit rebuilds it from whatever the source bone looks like now, including edits you made by hand.

Auto Dress analyses a finished rig, works out what every control is — finger, IK hand, pole, spine, root, eye, camera, settings bone — and builds a personal shape for each one from its library and presets, sized to your mesh and coloured by side. It reads names, but also the rig itself: IK targets, poles, aim constraints, finger chains under the hand and settings bones read by drivers. It understands the naming conventions of the common rig systems and game rigs.

Run it

1. Enter Pose Mode on the rig.
2. Press Generate Shapes in the Auto Dress panel. A dialog asks how.
3. Choose the scope, a style and any overrides (below), then confirm.
4. Press F9 to switch style and see the rig redressed in place.

The dialog

Styles

Each style is a set of per-body-part presets taken from what real rigs actually draw, so the result reads as one coherent rig rather than a pile of unrelated widgets.

Hands

Under Groups ▸ Hands you can choose Cubes (filled), Wire Cubes (edges only, so the fingers show through in solid shading) or Rings.

Shape Groups: swap one body part later

On a rig that is already dressed, the Shape Groups dropdowns under the button swap one body part at a time. Pick Rings for the hands and only the hands are rebuilt. Each rig remembers what it wears.

What it does when it is not sure

Bones it cannot classify with confidence are left undressed and selected, so the next thing on screen is the work still to do. A wrong shape is worse than none. The status bar reports the result, for example 156 dressed; 3 unsure, selected.

Custom rig profiles EXPERIMENTAL

You can teach Auto Dress your own rig. Give it a rig: the add-on analyses it and saves the result as a custom profile that can be used to dress other rigs.

Dress a character rig quickly

1. Pose Mode on the finished rig. Auto Dress ▸ Generate Shapes.
2. Pick a style (Whole Rig if you want everything redressed).
3. Press F9 and try the other styles in place.
4. Fix the bones it left selected (see Select Unshaped), then fine-tune single controls with Active Shape.

Shapes for props, weapons and mechanical parts

1. Make sure each part is weighted to its bone, or parented to it with Ctrl+P ▸ Bone.
2. Select the bones and press Generate Shapes. Silhouette follows the outline; Mesh reads from every angle; Box is for the big assembly or root.
3. If a part is held by a Child Of or Copy Transforms constraint instead, turn on Advanced ▸ Object Constraints first.

Reuse a good shape everywhere

1. Edit a shape until you like it (Adjust Shape or Edit Shape Mesh).
2. Library ▸ Save to store it in a category.
3. On any other rig, pick it in the Library and press Apply Shape (On The Bone for predictable sizing).

Move a finished set of shapes to another rig

Use Transfer in the Output section. Shapes are matched by bone name, so it is most useful between rigs that share a naming scheme.

You changed the model after rigging

Select the affected bones and press Refit. Every bone is rebuilt with the settings it remembers, including shapes you copied from another bone.

Keep your shapes but change their colours

Use Colour for a palette on the selection, Colour By Collection to colour FK, IK and deform groups at once, or Auto Dress ▸ Colour Controls for left/right pairs on a whole rig.

These are understood behaviours, not bugs. Knowing them saves time.

Where things are stored

• Widget objects go in the collection named in Output (Boneshapes by default), kept out of the view layer.
• How each shape was made is stored on the bone itself, so it survives the widget being deleted, replaced by hand or swapped for a library shape. That is what makes Refit work.
• The library lives in the add-on’s own user folder, outside the add-on, so reinstalling or updating does not touch it. The folder button in the Library panel opens it.

Reporting a problem

Rigs vary more than any test file can cover, so reports from real rigs are the most useful thing you can send. Please include:

• Your Blender version and which rig system it is (or “custom”).
• How the geometry is attached to the bones: weights, bone parenting or constraints.
• The bone name, what it got and what you expected. The name is usually the whole story.
• The line the operator printed in the status bar (for example 156 dressed; 3 unsure, selected).
• If you can share it, the .blend. A rig with its mesh is enough.

Better Shape Bone · Documentation for 1.28.1 · GPL-3.0-or-later · Dmytro Ilchuk