Jiggle Physics adds secondary motion to armature bones — hair, tails, cloth flaps, anything that should keep moving after the character stops. It replaces the usual workarounds for that problem: hand-animating overlap on every shot, or building a cloth or softbody sim and then transferring the result back onto bones. Here you tick a checkbox on the bones you want, and they react while you scrub the timeline.
What It Does
- Simulates jiggle on selected pose bones with a Verlet solver that supports squash and stretch, not just rotation
- Runs live in the viewport, so you tune damping and stiffness against playback instead of re-baking to see a change
- Collides against scaled empties, with limited mesh collision available
- Draws the rest pose in green and the simulated pose in red, so you can see exactly how far the sim has pulled away
- Reacts to the object’s own motion, so a character carried by a moving rig behaves correctly
- Every parameter is keyframeable, so the amount of jiggle can change shot to shot
How You Use It
Open the Animation tab in the 3D viewport sidebar (N), enable jiggle for the scene, then in pose mode select your bones and tick Jiggle Bone. The rest pose comes from position and rotation keyframes on those bones, so the sim always has something to settle back toward.
Good To Know
- Free and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later, by naelstrof — source and issue tracker on GitHub
- Version 4.5.3, Blender 4.2 LTS and newer, 32 KB
- 80,900+ downloads on Blender Extensions, rated 5.0 from 33 reviews — one of the most installed animation add-ons on the platform
- You must bake before rendering. The sim is disabled at render time so frames can’t be evaluated out of order
- Connected bones can’t be translated or stretched — disconnect them if you want stretch
- Mesh collision struggles with thin or flat surfaces; scaled empties are the reliable option
- Heavily constrained rigs and bendy bones limit what it can do
Where It Fits
If you animate characters with hair, tails, straps or anything that trails, this is the cheapest possible upgrade to your shots — 32 KB, no dependencies, and the result reads instantly. It is not a replacement for a proper cloth solve on a hero garment, and the bake-before-render requirement means it belongs in your shot checklist rather than your render settings. Riggers working with heavily constrained production rigs should test it on a spare bone chain before committing.