aka “Learning to bone with Kythreen”
We’re entering an extremely exciting time in the virtual photography world of Baldur’s Gate 3 with the innovations brought about in the newest and forthcoming versions of Lighty Lights, the ever-improving must-have mod from rakor.
In particular, with the “Bone Zone,” dummy skeletons can be directly posed in-game rather than needing to have poses crafted through external programs and then added by mods or hotloading.
If you are already used to working with the game’s skeletal rigs for posing and expression modding, you will already have a good sense of what transforming each of the bones will do, but if you aren’t already neck-deep in Blender, the bone naming conventions and systematics might be a little overwhelming.
Anatomy 101
Body Bones
BonesBody – Shoulders [In Progress]
BonesBody – Arms [In Progress]
BonesBody – Hands [In Progress]
BonesBody – Legs [In Progress]
Facial Bones
BonesFacial – Eyes [In Progress]
BonesFacial – Brows [Forthcoming]
BonesFacial – Cheek [Forthcoming]
BonesFacial – Lips [Forthcoming]
BonesFacial – Tongue [In Progress]
BonesFacial – Chin [Forthcoming]
BonesFacial – SmileLines [Forthcoming]
BonesFacial – Piercing [Forthcoming]
Tail Bones
BonesTail – Tail [Forthcoming]
Wing Bones
BonesWing – Scapula [Forthcoming]
BonesWing – Shoulders [Forthcoming]
BonesWing – Elbows [Forthcoming]
BonesWing – Wrist [Forthcoming]
Kinda IK Bones
Tips and Tricks
- Your go-to for most modifications should be rotation, not translation (movement). For those used to making poses in Blender, one thing that might be unintuitive is that you cannot move ankles/wrists without deformation in the standard body bones within the Bone Zone; this has to be brought about by rotation of the shoulder/hip etc. There are, however, options that approximate the old-fashioned “grab a hand” or “grab a foot” in Blender: these can be found in the “BonesBodyKindaIK” section. Translation is your best friend for un-mis-aligning elbow and knee joints.
- Less is more – small adjustments, especially in the facial features, tend to look much less cartoonish than large-scale rotations.
- For facial expressions, make all of your modifications along the line of what you’re altering (e.g. all of the lower eyelid movements) before making bigger modifications.
- Create your pose categorisation scheme prior to saving poses, and create it outside of the game so you can arrange it to your liking, then put them in one at a time in the order you want them to appear as a catalog.
- Save save save save save save save save. No, really – save at various intervals with different names, save before you make any major adjustments, and save with clear names that indicate what you’ve altered. You’ll be very glad you did so.
- If you aren’t starting from the suggested T-pose, write down the “base pose” (maybe making it part of the pose name) and/or take a screenshot that shows at what point in an animation your altered pose starts.
For most of these, I have only shown unidirectional rotation along the three axes, rather than including scaling and translated changes for now. As stated above, you’ll want to be working with rotation for the most part, anyway, and both scaling and translation go very quickly from being a VP tool to being an instrument of body horror very rapidly.
In nearly all of these, I exaggerated the amount of rotation aggressively so that it would be obvious what regions are affected by the changes.
Unless otherwise noted, the slider movements pictured are positive (aka towards the slider controls). In other words, if you want the inverse movement of what is pictured, move them towards the left instead. You can also mirror some bone positions using the “Symmetry” checkbox at the top of the Bone Zone.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, starting with the Kinda IK Bones and Spine sections are likely to bear quick fruit and are reasonably intuitive while yielding some quick results. And, when in doubt, the [r] to the right of the sliders will reset individual bones, and there is a “Reset all” at the top of the Bone Zone as well.