A cool thing I just came up with

[Jkoseattle]

So many bones...

I've had struggles keeping all the bones straight on my rigs. I like to keep the labels on them and colorize them and try to keep them organized, but they are always something of a muddle. Then I came up with a brilliant (for me) technique I think will serve me well.

I snapped a screen shot of my character and added the image into a layer. I then enlarged it to enormous size and set the opacity to about 40%. I set it to not render, but it's off the screen anyway. Now I have a huge copy of my character next to my stage, and I just place the bones on the body parts they manipulate. So cool. Thought I'd share.

[Greenlaw]

Sounds interesting. Curious to see what you did.

Managing bones and reducing screen clutter can be a task in itself. Here are some tips...

• If there are bones in the rig that shouldn't be touched by the animator, you can use Shy to hide them. Then you can use the shortcut to toggle the visibility when you need to make an edit to the bone or its action. For example, I often have Smart Bone Dials (SBD) that are only meant to be controlled by other SBDs, so I shy these when the rig is completed. (I have a button in MQC specifically showing/hiding shy bones...easier if you use a tablet or if you just don't want to remember the shortcut.)
• If you have bones on the face that need to be animated, notably for the eyes, the face can start to get cluttered. I find that it helps to use a second set of eye position bones located outside of the head that move the actual eye bones on the face. The link is made using a Position Constraint. This not only reduces 'face clutter', it also makes it easier to switch to controlling a different set of eye position bones for, say, a profile pose (just constrain them to the same external bones.) Once you have this setup, you can shy all the eye position bones on the face. An example of this setup can be seen in the gorilla project that comes with Moho.
• I like to parent my SBD to the character so they move with the character. The best way is to first parent a bone to your root and call this something like sbdStabilizer. Next, enable Independent Angle for this bone. Finally, parent the root bone for your SBDs to sbdStabilizer and Shy the sbdStabilizer bone. Now when your character moves and turns, the SBD will move with it, and it will maintain its vertical orientation even if the character bends or flips over. BTW, having a root bone for your SBDs makes it easy to move all the SBDs to a better screen location during animation, for example, if the controls start blocking another character or anything you need to see in the scene.
• Sometimes I'll have multiple SBD root bones in a rig. For example, one for body controls and one for head/face controls. Typically, I'll place the body controls to the side of a character, and the head/face controls above the head. As mentioned earlier, having the root bone for SBDs makes it easy to move them for shot specific reasons. For example, if the framing is a close up of the face, it might be easier to animate the head/face controls if its root is moved from above the head to the side of the head.
• I mentioned this in another post but I find color coding bones for left, right and center is very helpful during animation, especially when characters are turning or when their limbs cross over each other. For example, I typically color left side bones green, right side bones red and center or non-paired bones orange. Of course you should use colors that contrast well with your character design.

Well, that's a few tricks I can think of off the top of my head. Another idea I've had is to use Vitruvian Bones to show/hide different sets of SBD controls. I've never actually tried this but I think it should work for reducing screen clutter from too many SBDs.

Hope this helps.