Wiggle Bones makes pose bones behave like springy rigid bodies in real time — hair, tails, antennae, straps, chains, anything that should lag behind the body and settle after it stops. The alternative is hand-animating overlap every shot, or running a sim and transferring the result back onto bones. This release is a refactor of Wiggle 2, rebuilt for current Blender while leaving the physics alone.
What It Does
- Simulates bones as springy rigid bodies, updating live as you scrub
- Bone pinning with a choice of solvers — Forward, Backwards, Mixed and Dual — so a chain can be driven from either end
- Collision against meshes or whole collections, with friction, bounce and stickiness settings
- Full Bone Collision tests along the entire bone length instead of only its endpoints
- Damped track constraints anchor a wiggling bone to a target while the rest of the chain reacts freely
- One-click bake to keyframes, with preroll so the sim settles before capture, and a looping option
- Library linking and override support, with per-scene overrides for linked assets
Good To Know
- Free and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later, by Hans_Xwh, with source and issue tracker on GitHub
- Version 1.1.1, 27 KB — the smallest physics add-on you are likely to install
- The two sources disagree on the version requirement. The Blender Extensions listing says 4.5 LTS and newer; the developer’s own README says Blender 5.0 and up. Test on 4.5 before you build a shot on it
- 17,700+ downloads, rated 5.0 from 9 reviews — the rounded score covers a four-star and a three-star, so it is not the unbroken run it implies
- Settings now live in registered Property Groups rather than unregistered ID properties, which cuts .blend file bloat but means old Wiggle 2 setups do not carry across. A legacy cleanup utility is included for exactly that migration
- Bone Pairs is explicitly work in progress and the developer says it may not behave correctly, being difficult to test
- The physics is deliberately unchanged from Wiggle 2. This is a maintenance fork, not a new solver, so it inherits that tool’s behaviour and its edges
Where It Fits
The clearest case is an animator who used Wiggle 2, upgraded Blender and found it broken — this is the continuation, and the cleanup utility exists to bring you over. For a new user the draw is a mature solver with real collision settings in 27 KB. On a long project, note that one maintainer is carrying someone else’s codebase forward, and bake early rather than handing anyone a file with a live sim in it.