Blender bones are confusing. How do they work?

Question

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Coming from 3DS max, blender's bones are kind of confusing

In green i rigged like i usually would, creating "transition" bones that serve no other purpose than to connect more important bones together (like connecting the tail bone to the upper leg bone).

the big part of the bone would be the center of rotation. if you disconnect a bone it just turns into a dot, showing it's just a rotation point with no connections. Blender's bones don't do that witch makes it more confusing to figure out where the center of rotation is.

In red i rigged it according to all the tutorials i've followed. They always seem to connect bones with constrains instead of connecting the bones. This would be fine but blender's bones seem to work differently. As you can see the constrain connects to the top of the tail bone instead of the bottom part (the wide part) witch could cause problems with rotation. Can you make it connect to the bottom or does it not matter ?

Witch way am i supposed to rig ? additionally, if anyone has a tutorial for bone orientation i'd be grateful.

thank you very much, i'm loving blender's flexibility so far compared to other software.

Answer 1

When you are in Pose mode the rotation centre is the head of the bone:

What you show is the upper leg bone parented to the lower spine bone. You're talking about constraints but it's not cleat what you're talking about, in Blender, Constraints are tools used to control objects or bones, like for example Inverse Kinematics constraint, but I don't think there's any constraint between your upper leg and lower spine. I think you mean that these 2 bones are parented, upper leg is the child of lower spine. In that case there's a doted line between the two. This line appears between the parent's tail and the child's head. It won't cause any problem of rotation or please be more specific.

There are 2 kinds of parentage. The first case is the previous one: When you parent a bone to another one but you want the child to stay away you need to choose in Keep Offset mode: select the bone you want to make child, then the parent, then ctrlP > Keep Offset. If you want the child to stick to its parent, choose the Connected bone. If you extrude a bone from another one, it will be a connected child by default. You can separate it definitely with altP > Clear Parent, or keep it the child with altP > Disconnect Bone.

You'll find a lot of tutorials about bones and rigging, explaining everything here would be a bit tedious, I think BlenderStackExchange is more for punctual problems.