🦴 NovaBone Dynamics

Bone-chain physics simulation add-on — turn hair, tails, skirts, accessories and jiggle bones into automatic physics animation with a few clicks.

Author: Chamiseul

🇺🇸 English | 🇰🇷 한국어

✨ Features

• ✅ Pick a chain's start & end — simulation just works
• ✅ Scale-independent: identical motion on 1.0 Blender rigs and 0.01 Unreal-import rigs
• ✅ Tune collision visually with live shaper overlays
• ✅ Shape-accurate collision: Capsule / Cylinder / Box are probed as real volumes (not just visuals) with multi-contact resolution and sweep CCD anti-tunnelling
• ✅ Stable contacts: anti-fold (no bone ever snaps inside-out) and anti-kink (draped chains relax smoothly instead of zig-zagging)
• ✅ Chain mode + Spring (jiggle) mode
• ✅ Works as a collider for Blender cloth & hair sims
• ✅ Bake to keyframes for game-engine export

▲ The NovaBone N-panel — every setting lives in this one place

📥 Installation

1. Select the files inside the novabone folder and compress them to a zip

   ⚠️ Do NOT compress the folder itself — blender_manifest.toml must be at the zip root.

2. Blender → Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions
3. Top-right ▼ → Install from Disk → pick the zip
4. Enable NovaBone
5. In the 3D viewport press N → a NovaBone tab appears

Supported: Blender 4.2+ (tested on 5.0 / 5.2 LTS)

🚀 Quick Start (5 minutes)

▲ Select bones → create chains → play. That's it.

1. Select the armature, enter Pose Mode
2. Select the bones you want to simulate (for a connected tail: click the ROOT bone last, Shift+click the rest)
3. N-panel → Setup Tools → Chains from Selection
4. The bones sag slightly — success! Press Spacebar to play
5. Move a body bone — the chain follows with physics 🎉

💡 Shake & Play kicks the bones AND starts playback automatically. If they jiggle, the engine is alive.

🧭 Panel Layout

1️⃣ NovaBone Enabled

The big button at the top. Physics only runs while ON. Auto-enabled when you create a chain. OFF = pure animation playback.

2️⃣ NovaSol Solver

⚠️ Physics advances when the frame changes. Not moving while paused is normal.

🎯 Collision precision engine (v1.0.0)

NovaSol's collision is no longer a single sphere per bone. Every substep:

1. Volume probing — the chain's chosen Shape (Capsule / Cylinder / Box) is sampled as a bounded set of sphere probes laid through its REAL volume: spine points for capsules, lateral rings for cylinders, corner offsets for boxes. Mid-bone leaks through walls and "Box pushes round" are gone.
2. Multi-contact — up to 3 DISTINCT contacts (normals > 60° apart): the deepest at full strength, the others at 60%, so a bone resting across a corner seats on BOTH walls instead of rattling on one.
3. Sweep CCD — a bone that moved more than half its collision radius in one substep gets its PATH tested and is snapped back to the last free station. Fast whips no longer tunnel through thin plates.
4. Anti-fold — every contact correction is budgeted (max 75% of the bone's length per round) and direction-clamped (max 45° per round), so a bone can never snap folded inside-out; it slides around the surface over a few frames instead.
5. Anti-kink — after contacts resolve, each interior bone relaxes 15% toward its neighbours' average direction (Chain mode only), which smooths the zig-zag a draped chain would otherwise keep.
6. Residual re-check — any bone whose round was clamped or truncated gets one extra query + a small outward push so the round always ends OUTSIDE the surface. Clean frames pay none of this cost.

💡 All of this is automatic — no new sliders. If the panel's Solve xx ms climbs, lower Substeps first; probe density already covers what extra substeps used to.

3️⃣ Forces

Gravity

Procedural Wind

▲ Wind ON + playback = constantly swaying hair

💡 Enable wind if you want constant motion from playback alone.

4️⃣ Unit Normalization ⭐

Solves the classic problem: "Blender rigs have 1.0 bones, Unreal imports are 0.01 — the same values never match." All physics runs in a space normalized by the reference bone length (L), so identical values produce identical motion at any rig scale.

Scale presets: one click on Blender 1.0 or Unreal 0.01.

▲ Median bone length below shows the auto-detected reference

5️⃣ Setup Tools

Bone Prefix — recommended for game rigs

▲ All dyn_ bones become chains in one click

1. Enter a prefix in Prefix (default dyn_)
2. Click Chains from Prefix
3. Every prefixed bone is chained automatically

Chains from Selection

1. Select bones in Pose Mode — click the ROOT bone last
2. Click the button

✅ Single bone works: selecting exactly ONE bone and running this creates a 1-bone chain (Start = End = that bone) — no more "No chain created" warning. The active (root) bone is also never silently dropped in Auto mode anymore.

💡 Many accessories at once: select all necklace/earring bones and run Auto — each becomes an individual chain, all with physics.

Detect Chains Automatically

Finds leaf bones (no children) and chains the consecutive runs upward — no rig knowledge needed.

6️⃣ Armature Section

Show Bone Shapes ⭐

▲ Capsules span each bone head-to-tail and move with it. Raising Radius grows the diameter

Shapers are NOT new bones — they visualize each bone's collision volume.

• Choose Capsule / Cylinder / Box
• Radius = collision thickness (ratio to bone length — scale-free)
• Pixel-locked to the simulated bones during playback
• In Blender Simulation engine mode, shapers ARE the real collision objects
• In NovaSol mode the chosen shape now also drives the ACTUAL collision volume (see Collision precision engine above)

💡 Tuning: Show Bone Shapes ON → adjust Radius → where the capsule slightly overlaps the body is where collision begins.

7️⃣ Chains

Expand each chain with its ▼ arrow.

Chain row header: [▼] [name] [🎯 Select] [✓ enable] [🔇 mute] [X]

🎯 Per-chain Select button — with 10–20+ chains listed, press a row's select button to highlight exactly THAT chain's bones in the viewport AND make it the active chain (Preset / Copy Settings then act on what you clicked). No more guessing which chain owns which bones.

🎵 Motion

▲ Top: Chain (smooth return) / Bottom: Spring (bouncy overshoot)

📐 Limits

🥚 Bone Collision Shape

⚙️ Collision Engine

▲ NovaSol collision: moving the arm pushes the hair away from the body

Blender Simulation Profile: Hair (thin shells, low friction) / Cloth (thick shells, high damping) / Custom

External Targets: colliders that are NOT the cloth these bones belong to — other characters, floors, other garments. Use Add GN Collider to Targets to add the official Collider modifier.

⚠️ Cloth integration order: ① Show Bone Shapes ON ② add a Cloth modifier to the garment ③ check Cloth Collisions on the cloth ④ play

🎈 Floating Head

Simulates the head point of detached bones (Use Connect off) too.

8️⃣ Bake & Reset

🎨 Presets

📋 Recipes

🔧 Troubleshooting

❓ FAQ

Q. What are the NovaShape_* objects? Collision-volume visualizations. They're removed when Show Bone Shapes is turned off and always hidden from renders.

Q. How do I get this into a game engine? Bake NovaBone to Keyframes, then export FBX. Game engines replay the baked animation.

Q. Performance with the new collision? Volume probing is bounded (≤ ~16 sphere queries per bone per target, multi-contact and CCD only cost extra ON contact frames). Watch the per-chain solve time (ms) at the panel bottom; if it climbs, lower Substeps — probe density already covers what extra substeps used to.

Q. Single-bone accessories? Yes — Chains from Selection with exactly one bone now creates a 1-bone chain directly. Or use Individual mode, or enable Include Single Bones in Detect Chains.

Q. Which chain owns which bones? Press the 🎯 button on that chain's row — its bones light up in the viewport and it becomes the active chain.

📜 License

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 29 June 2007

This project is licensed under GPL-3.0, the standard Blender license. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

Made by Chamiseul 🦴