Show/Hide Bones with Keyframes

[bleak harness]

Is it possible to show/hide bones with keyframes in animations? So we don't have to scale the bones instead

[neon relic]

Welcome to the help forum! Once your question has been resolved, please mark the post as closed by typing !close.

[bleak harness]

please?

[bleak harness]

someone please i really need help here

[hot plover]

I think you can right-click the animation timeline and select Bring Up All Animators.

[bleak harness]

but how is this helping?

[south isle]

maybe so you know what bones are animated / keyframed and if you want you can hide manually

[hallow aurora]

Scaling bones is the way to go

If you need sharp transitions, make a keyframe where it's hidden, and immediately after that, one that's visible

Geckolib also has multiple transition curves, pick the one that makes the transition from invisible to visible the least obvious

[bleak harness]

that's exactly what i want to avoid
when it comes to groups, scaling can mess up their bones position

[bleak harness]

i'm not sure to understand what you mean, but what i need is to be able to show/hide bones with keyframes during the animation

[hallow aurora]

Is that an issue if you want to make it invisible anyways?

You could likely hide bones using code, but that'll be way harder

Only the position of children will change if you scale a bone down to 0.
If that's an issue, create an extra bone within the parent that contains the cubes you want to hide.

[bleak harness]

i'm just trying to understand why scaling is messing up with the bones position

[hallow aurora]

Of the bone you're scaling?

[bleak harness]

you're right i could just ignore since i will be using sharp transitions anyway, but i don't think that's supposed to happen

[bleak harness]

it's a group of bones

[hallow aurora]

So you're scaling their parent bone?

If yes, yeah that'll change the position of all child bones, because their position get's multiplied with the parents scale

[bleak harness]

so playing with the pivot point won't solve anything?

[hallow aurora]

I mean, you could. But there's not really a point in doing so

Like, Imagine you want to shrink the head of an entity, and it's ears just stay flying midair but still shrink

[bleak harness]

and the point is to scale everything like it was a single bone

and it's about calculating which should be a feature if not already

[hallow aurora]

For that you have to scale the parent bone

[bleak harness]

parent = group?

[hallow aurora]

Bones = folder, parent = the folder in which the bones/foldes are

group = folder = bone

[bleak harness]

so bones aren't cubes and it's a misunderstanding, are they?

what i'm doing currently is scaling the group that contains the cubes, which moves the cubes to different directions

[hallow aurora]

Select all the cubes, and click on center pivot.
Then the cubes should stay together if you scale the parent

(All cubes on that group, not your whole model)

[bleak harness]

and btw the group contains some other groups inside, what should i do with them?

[hallow aurora]

Could you maybe post a video of what exactly is happening, maybe I can explain it better then.

But basically, the pivot point of all cubes & groups, moves towards the pivot point of the parent group, if you are scaling that parent group

But this also means, that things shouldn't reallve move around as you scale it, only become smaller

[bleak harness]

that's the issue here, they do

only the groups inside though, not the individual cubes that are directly inside the main group

but manually setting their pivot point like the main group will also mess up their positions

📁 main group
∟🧊 cube
∟🧊 cube
∟🧊 cube
∟ 📁 group1
∟ 📁 group2
∟ 📁 group3

that's the structure

[hallow aurora]

And you're shrinking the main group here?

[bleak harness]

yes

the 3 groups inside don't have the same pivot point as the main group, which causes this issue

[hallow aurora]

I can't tell right now whether that's an intentional feature or a bug

[bleak harness]

if i try to fix the 3 groups pivot points by setting them exactly like the main folder, there will be the same problem

and i really don't wanna fix every single cube position, blockbench itself should be able to do it

and pretty sure that fixing their pivot points myself would cause some issues in the animation anyway

[hallow aurora]

@harsh stirrup sorry for summoning you, but you're the geckolib master and everyone that I just asked agrees that this is not how it should work.
Tldr; scaling a bone doesn't properly keep child bones "attached" at the same spot.

[desert violet]

Make a separate sub-bone that contains all of the elements you want to hide. And scale that

[bleak harness]

like that ?

this is the original structure

[desert violet]

<main group>
- <element group to hide>
- <other sub-groups>

You don't want the sub groups to be affected by the scaling down of the elements right? So you want the new element group to be on a separate "branch" of the tree from the other sub groups

[bleak harness]

I actually want the main group to be hidden as explained earlier

[desert violet]

Right, but you also want some of it's children to be unaffected right?

[bleak harness]

Everything basically

[desert violet]

So you want to hide the elements in the main group, without affecting it's child bones/groups

Just double checking I have this right

[bleak harness]

the main group is itself inside a group but it doesn't matter, but i want to hide the main group so everything inside

📁 main group (this)
∟🧊 cube
∟🧊 cube
∟🧊 cube
∟ 📁 group1
∟ 📁 group2
∟ 📁 group3

[desert violet]

So you want the cubes to vanish without affecting the groups 1 through 3?

Essentially hiding the group visibly via scaling them down

That's what my solution does.
Simply put all of the elements in the main group into their own subgroup and scale that instead of the main group

[hot plover]

Could I have a quick recap on what the issue is?

[bleak harness]

Everything

[hallow aurora]

They want to hide the entire group (including children) trough scaling. (if there's a better way than scaling that'll work too)
But the child groups (group 1-3) did weirdly move around when scaling the parent.

[hot plover]

But the child groups (group 1-3) did weirdly move around when scaling the parent.
You can just center pivot

[desert violet]

Oh, you mean the pivot point of the parent is in a weird location so the scaling looks off?

[bleak harness]

group1 2 and 3 basically move to different directions on scaling yes

[hallow aurora]

Kandda, may I once again ask for a video? I think this would make solving this a lot easier

[desert violet]

All scaling in a group is done relative to the highest level pivot point. So in this case the main group's pivot point

[hot plover]

Not exactly sure what it is, but yeah, when the pivots of parent/child bones are off it will scale weirdly. So centering pivot while having everything (including parent bone) selected (before scaling) fixes it

[desert violet]

Well, that might fix it in some cases

[hallow aurora]

In theory, when scaling all cubes and child groups, should stay "in the same position, just scaled down"

[desert violet]

Right

[hallow aurora]

But this doesn't seem to happen based on what Kandda said

[desert violet]

But they move if the pivot (the origin) is offset from the center

[bleak harness]

When i can i'll try to

[hallow aurora]

ShareX has a video/gif recording option, and is generally a tool I'd recommend everyone for making quick screenshots and the like

[desert violet]

The pivot point being off-center causes "movement" relative to the pivot point when scaling

[bleak harness]

if all cubes move together while scaling without being separated i don't mind, but in my problem the 3 groups inside get separated by going to different directions

[desert violet]

That's odd

[bleak harness]

That is surprisely working

selecting groups and cubes individually isn't a thing on blockbench
but we can just select the main group

[desert violet]

That's definitely not correct, I'd like to see a video if of this phenomenon when possible

[desert violet]

huh?

Just click the group again

[hot plover]

Yeah, you can select cubes and groups individually.

But all I said was centering the pivot before scaling

[bleak harness]

you can select cubes together, groups together, but not both

which is weird but anyway

[hot plover]

That is still not related to my solution

[bleak harness]

i know what your solution is, was just explaining that it was what i tried to do before

so i couldn't figure out how to center all elements

i just had to select the main folder which would select everything, which is what you're saying

[desert violet]

I'm confused as to how scaling JUST the main group is causing all of the sub-groups to move in different directions relative to the main group's pivot

[hot plover]

That's just how it's been for a long time

(Not related to the GeckoLib format)

[desert violet]

Is this not an animation issue?

That would explain a lot

Scaling is weird in edit mode

[bleak harness]

this post is geckolib tagged because i wanted to know if there was a way to hide bones without having to scale them

which would be a great feature actually

[desert violet]

Hide in-game or in-tool?

[bleak harness]

i mean during the animations

with keyframes

[desert violet]

Ah

[bleak harness]

i'll record both the problem i have with scaling

that's an example of what happens when scaling some bones

@hallow aurora here's the video

[hallow aurora]

Ehm.. have you actually tried scaling it in an animation, and not in edit mode?

[bleak harness]

wait so the problem is only from edit mode from the beginning?

[hallow aurora]

I am 99% sure, yes.

To scale in edit mode, you'd use "Transform > Scale"

That scales the whole model properly

[bleak harness]

you are so right
add a percent, i'm actually surprised

i just thought scaling with geckolib would do the same thing as edit mode, so i didn't even try doing it on geckolib to see

which is dumb

for my case it works as intended, since i'm trying to scale in the animations, but what about scaling it in edit mode?

centering the pivot point of the main group doesn't always work

[hallow aurora]

To scale in edit mode, you'd use "Transform > Scale"
I am not sure whether it'll scale the whole model, or just the selected group though.

[bleak harness]

it's literally what i'm using though

you can see it in the video as well

[hallow aurora]

Then try clicking on selection center when you have that menu open

[bleak harness]

What does that do?

[hallow aurora]

🤷 I haven't used that option in ages. But I guess it changes it rescaled based on the center of your selection, rather than the bones relatively

[bleak harness]

Well i clicked it, it updated the values, but still same problem when scaling

I don't think anyone wants that to happen when scaling, so i guess it can be considered as a bug

I'm lucky that geckolib scales correctly, edit mode should take some notes

[hallow aurora]

In edit mode you're scaling all parts seperately when you select them.

Groups them self don't have a scale outside of animations.

[bleak harness]

that's why they should

[hallow aurora]

Feel free to suggest it in #bb-feedback-archive

[bleak harness]

there should be a suggestion form channel, with approved/denied system

i'm literally suggesting a suggestion channel

[hallow aurora]

That exists, it's called github issues 😛

the feedback channel is more informal, but get's considered too

Also, suggestions are usually not straight approved/denied.
There's usually a lot more to stuff than people consider.