Pose Edit Mode

Pose a character joint by joint, or start from a named pose and adjust from there.

A character arrives in a default stance. Getting it to kneel, reach, or sit in a car seat means moving joints, not the whole figure. Pose Edit Mode does that one joint at a time.

Pose Edit Mode shipped in release 2.0.67.

A character in Pose Edit Mode, joints shown as white dots along the rig, with the mode indicator top left and the control legend bottom left

Pose a joint

1. Select the character in Build.
2. Open Pose Edit Mode from the Pose button on the contextual toolbar that appears with the character selected. The indicator at the top left changes to read Pose Edit Mode, and the button's own tooltip changes to Exit pose mode, because it is a toggle: click it again to come back out.
3. Find the joint. Joints appear as white dots along the rig: shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, ankles.
4. Click the joint. Rotation rings appear around it, one per axis.
5. Drag a ring. The limb rotates around that axis. The rest of the figure holds.

Rotating a joint in Pose Edit Mode

Start from a named pose

Building a pose from the default stance is slow. The Select Pose library holds presets you can drop onto the character and adjust from there.

Poses carry names like Being Carried, Bent Over, and Crouch 01 through Crouch 06. A search field filters the list.

The Select Pose library, showing named pose thumbnails and a search field

Pick one, then adjust individual joints on top of it. Choosing a pose closes the drawer and puts focus back on the viewport, so undo works on the pose you just applied without clicking into the scene first.

Filter chips sit above the thumbnails, or inside the grid when the drawer is narrow. The pose you are currently on is marked in the grid.

The picker is for choosing, not for contributing. There is no control in it for saving a pose you have built back into the library as a custom entry.

Move the whole character

Posing joints moves limbs. To move the figure itself, select the root circle at the base of the rig. With it selected the ordinary gizmo comes back, so you can translate, rotate and scale the whole character, with the same global and local modes and the same snapping you use outside the mode. See Transform.

That means you can pose a character and place it without leaving and re-entering.

Added in release 2.0.72.

Moving around while you pose

The camera controls differ from the main Build viewport.

Action	Input
Orbit	Mouse
Pan	Mouse
Zoom	Mouse
Frame the character	F

Esc exits, and so does the X in the control bar, and so does clicking the Pose button a second time. The mode's own toolbar labels its exit Exit pose mode.

Hairstyle

Pose is not the only thing on that contextual toolbar. Hairstyle sits beside it and opens a Select Hairstyle drawer: a grid of styles with a Search hairstyles field above it, and a None card first that clears whatever the character is wearing.

The Select Hairstyle drawer: a None card carrying a crossed-circle icon, then a grid of hairstyle thumbnails, with a search field across the top

Picking one applies it and closes the drawer, the same way the pose library behaves.

Related

• Working with objects for selection, parenting, and transforms
• Animation for keyframing a character across a shot