Custom bone shapes are what turn an armature into something an animator will touch. Making them by hand is a loop: model a shape, move it into place, assign it as the bone’s custom object, then fix its scale and rotation because it never lands right the first time — repeated for every controller on the rig. Bone Widget applies shapes from a library and handles the fitting.
What It Does
- Applies shapes from an editable library to selected pose bones, sized to the bone, with a thumbnail panel for picking them
- Scale, rotate and slide a widget along the bone axis after applying, adjustable from the redo panel
- Add your own shapes to the library and import or export widgets and colour presets as JSON
- Bone colour management for pose and edit mode, with a Copy Color to Selected operator
- Copy Bone Widget pushes one bone’s shape onto others
- Symmetrize widgets across mirrored bone pairs instead of placing each side by hand
- Curve objects work as widgets, not only meshes
- Batch housekeeping: clear widgets, delete unused shape objects, resync names, and filter the list between built-in and user widgets
Good To Know
- Free and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later, by Wayne Dixon — source and issue tracker on GitHub
- Version 2.4.0, Blender 4.2 LTS and newer, 616 KB. The panel sits in the 3D viewport sidebar (N) under the Rigging tab
- 24,800+ downloads on Blender Extensions, rated 5.0 from 22 reviews — more actual feedback behind that score than most rigging add-ons carry
- Requests file permission to read and write JSON and image files, which is how the shape library and its thumbnails are stored
- It assumes one widget object per bone. If several bones share a single widget, the resync-names operation can hit naming conflicts — worth knowing before you point twenty fingers at one shape
- A reviewer reports custom image widgets not refreshing live on Blender 5.2.0; restarting Blender shows them
Where It Fits
Anyone who rigs in Blender more than occasionally should have this installed — it is the closest Blender gets to Maya-style controller work, and the colour and symmetrize tools matter most when you are handing a rig to someone else to animate. If you only ever pose Rigify rigs, you need it less: Rigify generates its own widgets. And if you are building one character for one shot, hand-modelling three shapes is not the bottleneck this solves.