Small bones in character after importing from MakeHuman using Collada

Question

I'm new, so I don't really understand what I'm doing.

I've created a character in MakeHuman and exported as Collada.

Then I imported it into Blender and I couldn't find any of the bones, it was really confusing. Until I made the skill invisible and zoom in a really long way.

The bones in my character are so small they are about the smaller then the characters finger nails.

Is this normal?

Is there a quick fix where I can resize all my bones in a couple of clicks?

Or do I have to resize each and every bone one by one?

Should I use a different format instead of Collada to avoid this problem?

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I'm editing my question because things have progressed, I'm now trying a different export format, I'm using fbx Filmbox.

And I have the opposite problem of the bones being too big. However at least the bones are pointing in different directions and not just vertical (like they were with the Collada file type).

I still can't resize the bones. I'm just getting confused by everything. How do I shrink the bones to a normal size?

Answer 1

It's okay that it did that. In general, bones don't really need length: they most fundamentally represent origins of rotation and scaling. They need axes, which Blender calculates from their tails, but axes could be calculated in other ways as well, like from the armature object's axes. So the location of bone tails is not stored in most formats-- it's a Blender-specific thing.

Of course, that's not very convenient in Blender, where you want to be able to see your bones. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to make them longer.

Start by making sure you can see all bones, by setting all armature layers to display and unhiding any bones, then select all bones in edit mode. Switch to "individual origins" pivot point. Then scale them all up by a huge number, until you can see them. I'd do this numerically, 's' then '1' then '0' then '0' then '0' etc until I can see the bones' lengths, then of course enter to confirm the scale. When troubleshooting other people's rigs, I think I've ended up scaling them up by 10,000 or so.

This isn't a good idea in the case of "connected" bones, but these kinds of tiny bones are not going to have the connected property. It can also affect bone constraints, but again, no armature like this is going to have any kind of bone constraints.

Answer 2

I managed to fix it by deleting all the bones in the armature and adding a new armature, because Blender can add an armature of an entire human skeleton. However I have to adjust this standard skeleton to fit the model (particularly the size of the head).

But now it all works.

Answer 3

When you choose the model to import, and before pressing the button "Import COLLADA", on the right side of the screen you will see "Armature Options". Add those three options (Fix Leaf Bones, Find Bone Chains and Auto Connect) by clicking on them. Do Not click on Keep Bind info. I have no idea why this is necessary. I kept having I think the same problem as you are having. I would think that Makehuman would do this automatically. Anyway cheers.