Bone Layers

Jim’s rig is looking much more functional, but you still have a lot of bones that you’re not supposed to move (like the helpers) and they might get in the way while you work. To hide them, you’ll use Bone Layers.

Bone Layers are similar to Scene Layers, but they work only inside the Armature. On the Armature tab, in the Skeleton panel, you’ll see four sets of little squares. The first two sets, under Layers, are the layers themselves. The other two sets, under Protected Layers, are layers that reset in other files when you link this rig to another .blend file to prevent changes to them (like the helpers, for example), but that’s an advanced feature and won’t be covered here.

When you’re in Edit or Pose Mode, you can select one or more bones and, by pressing M, you’ll access the Bone Layers. Again, this is very similar to the Scene Layers for organizing objects. When you press M, a pop-up menu will appear and you can select squares. Each one of the little squares is a layer. As the same bone can indeed belong to more than a single layer, select more than one layer with Shift + LMB to add that bone to more than one layer.

Once you have bones added to layers, you can show or hide layers from the Armature tab by left clicking the layers. Use the Shift key while you click to show or hide more than one layer.

Assign bones to layers depending on their purpose. For Jim’s rig, you can add the deformer bones to one layer, the helpers to another, and the controllers to a third. Bones that are both deformers and controllers can be included in those two layers.

You can now show or hide only the layers you need. For example, when you’re going to work on the skinning, you can show only the layer of deformer bones, so the rest of the layers are not in the way. When the rig is finished, you can hide the deformer and helper layers, so only the bones you should move to control the rig are visible in their layer. In other words, showing or hiding layers will make it easier to work with the rig and you’ll only ever see what you need to see.

Later in this chapter, you’ll create the facial rig. You can also store it in a different layer, which allows you to work first on the full character pose, and once it’s done, you can show the facial rig and work on the facial expressions. Having the facial rig showing all the time can confuse you or you may accidentally move something in the face when you’re working on the body pose.