I'm not sure if this is me being an idiot and not grasping something completely obvious, or whether this behaviour is unintended, but I am having a few issues when scaling the "root" bone when child bones have been rotated.

Basically, if I drag an image into an empty project and scale the root bone along either axis then it works as expected.

If I add a bone to the image (as a child of the root bone) and leave it positioned as default, then it also works fine when scaling the root bone along either axis.

However if I add a bone to the image (as a child of the root bone), rotate the bone to match my image and then scale the root bone, then the axis seem to get reversed.

I have simplified this using a square image, and rotated the bone to 90 degrees to emulate me rotating the bone to match an image in my actual character setup.

Here are some pics to show what I mean.

Scale at 1.0/1.0

The bone I added is rotated 90 degrees, as per the explanation above.

Scaled down on x-axis to 0.3

As you can see, the square should scale on the x-axis, but actually scales on the y-axis when the scale is performed on the root bone.

Scaled down on y-axis to 0.3

Again the square should scale on the y-axis, but in fact is scaled on the x-axis when the scale is performed on the root bone.

I assume this is because the bone I created for the square image (ie. not the root bone) is rotated to 90 degrees and is thus scaling based on this rotation, but I thought that scaling the root bone would scale all children in relation to the axis of the parent...

Am I being thick or missing something, as this is really confusing me as to how and why this is happening?

PS. Just to add I am trying to scale a character in a sort of squash/stretch manner when animating, but obviously with the various rotations of bones within the rigs then when I do this they basically deform and/or explode in all manner of directions.

If this is by design and a known issue/feature, then what is the workaround?

Cheers.

Hey Nate,

So would the same problem occur if I created my own parent bone and scaled that?
What about the runtime scaling commands, do these have the same effect?

Is there some workaround as from what you have said I will have to scale each bone one by one for every frame of animation, which doesn't sound right?

Cheers.