My IK bones are wire mesh and cannot be clicked on (selected) in either edit mode or pose mode. I'm using blender 4.2

Question

My IK bones cannot be selected in either pose or edit mode. They are mesh and all the other bones are solid.

I am following a video on rigging a character. I got almost done, however the IK bone is mesh, and I cannot select it in either pose or edit mode.

Edit: Original poster's son here, got some screenshots. I hope these help, and thank you for your feedback thus far. They're still fairly new to blender (I'm even more new to it), so I apologize if any technical explanations may go over our heads or if we're explaining the issue poorly. I believe what they're asking is if this bone will cause issues with their rigging/animating, and if it needs to be deleted (And how to do so since they can't select it) or if it can be safely ignored. If it's an issue, they'd also like to know how to avoid it in the future. Thank you all, again.

Answer 1

As hinted by the fact that your bones aren't displayed the same way, and more importantly, seeing in your outliner that you have multiple Armature objects:

The issue becomes clearer: you can't select those bones because they aren't part of the same armature object.

Why does it matter

Objects, are a container that exists at a specific location, rotation and scale in the 3D space and carries data, such as mesh, curves, bones, ...

An Armature object is the object that contains bones for animation, whereas bones are the individual parts inside the armature. Also, sometimes referred to as "rig", which is the term to call the whole system of "things" that make a model animatable.

Commonly, we use only one armature for an entire character (props are sometimes part of the character rig, but sometimes on their own if shared by many characters).
That is because handling bones within the same armature is easy, whereas animating bones across multiple armatures, or worse, making them interact, gets quickly complicated with hierarchy and dependency issues.
Yet we need different armatures for things that also need to be independent.

How to fix

Fortunately, turning multiple objects of the same type into one is pretty easy. ↹ Tab into Object mode. Select the objects you want to join, finishing by the one you want to join "into", then hit ⎈ CtrlJ to join the objects together.

If you had constraints already setup, you may need to check if they still point to the correct bones.

You may also need to make sure each bones you have is correctly named. If two bones were named the same in individual armatures, they would have been renamed during the join, as there can't be identical bone names within the same armature.

Finally, check your bone hierarchy, you should always have only one root bone (to avoid standard issues when exporting outside of Blender).

Answer 2

I'm really new to Blender as well, but I think I might be able to help, maybe. That bone is the 'root' bone, and is what holds the character in place, so it doesn't sink it to the floor or something. By selecting it, you should be able to move the entire model as if you selected all and hit G and dragged it around.

I'm not sure why its not clickable, but it could be something to do with your Visibility or Viewport Display in the object properties tab, or it could be from the Viewport Display in the Armature (little green running man) tab.

There are ways to select a bone by going into your Bones layer on the Layer selector, just keep expanding it until you find that bone on the list, it might have some special property attached to it.

Have you tried moving your model in pose mode? If so, does that bone seem to have any weight attached which makes your model deform? If not, you may not need to worry about it at all. It shouldn't interfere, so you should be able to safely ignore it.