What is Blender DemBones?

Blender DemBones is the add-on which integrates open-source project called DemBones. It's an automated algorithm to convert your mesh animations (e.g. cloth/water simulations) to bone animations. It can be used in various tasks:

• Bake your animated deformations to bone animations, that you can later use in a game engine
• Skin (or improve your Skinning) of your existing rigged models
• Bake deformation cages, corrective smooth modifiers and much more

This add-on is fully integrated with DemBones (including such features as demLock, partially solve by using vertex colour, etc).

How to install?

The installation procedure is the same as for other Blender add-ons. 

1. Go to Edit > Preferences... > Add-ons 
2. Click Install...
3. Select downloaded .zip archive blender_dembones.zip
4. Click the check box to activate the add-on

If you're running on Windows, run Blender as Administrator and hit the Execute button. You need to do this only once.

This action is needed to update Blender's original .fbx export/import add-on with the option to export `demLock` attribute.

If you're experiencing any kind of errors, try to change `intermediateFile` path in the add-on preferences:

If you want to try the original version (without the Blender integration), it is available completely for free here. 

How it works?

There are multiple use cases for this add-on:

1. Mesh sequence -> Bones anim and weights

2. Mesh sequence and bone anim -> Weights

3. Mesh sequence and weights -> Bone anim

4. Mesh sequence and bone anim -> Optimized weights

5. Solve helper bones with demLock

6. Partially solve skinning with per-vertex color of the mesh

Input requirements

For accurate results, please make sure to follow the requirements listed below. Although it's possible to get some results without following the requirements, the outcome may be unpredictable.

• Transformations (location, rotation, scale) are applied
• All the objects share the same world translation, rotation and scale
• Both meshes have the same number of vertices
• The current frame is the rest pose

Updates

 - Version 1.0.1 -

1. Correct import of solved meshes which contain shape keys
2. Default `log` and `intermediateFiles` paths are changed to the add-on's folder 
3. `log`, `intermediateFiles` and `dbg` options are moved to the add-on preferences. They're persistent now, you can change them just once
4. Add-on is now correctly disabled when unchecking it in Preferences>Add-ons