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2.4.1

Rig Edit EnhancementsAugust 29, 2026

Rig Edit is the release. It grew five tools, and they are all for one thing: getting a bone chain inside a part - a bowstring, a cable, a bow limb - instead of placing it by hand and hoping. The bullets below say what is new; the full account, with the measurements and the refusals, is in Rig Edit.

New​

  • Trace and Chain - two ways to get a bone chain inside a part. Trace takes the two ends of a thin strand and measures its axis out of the geometry, so the chain lands inside the string rather than beside it, already bound and with a radius taken from what it measured. Chain is for parts too thick for that - a bow limb has no cross-section to find - and takes the axis from you instead: one bone per click, each landing halfway through the part. In the Bones flyout, next to + Bone. How they work

  • Draw - pull a whole bow from one slider, once each limb carries a bound chain. The string keeps its length, so the limbs have to give: one equation with one unknown, solved per frame. Nothing is written, and letting go puts it back. Under Test on a strand binding. How it works

  • Reverse and Swap - turn a chain around so the far end becomes the root, or turn a single parent-child relation around. The bones never move; only the parenting changes. The difference

  • Bow Draw - the same solver as a component, so a rigged bow bends in your game with no animation involved. Move the string's bone from your own code and the limbs follow. Weight painting cannot do this: skinning is a linear blend, so a bone that moves only ever produces movement, never a bend. It stands on its own - delete the rest of the package and your bow keeps working. Under Animation Workbench ▸ Bow Draw. Setting it up

  • Rigs - a window listing everything you have added bones or weights to, with the uncommitted changes next to each and a way straight back into Rig Edit. Until now that work was visible nowhere: every list in the Workbench wants an Animator, and a rigged bow does not have one. In the Workbench toolbar.

  • Repair Script References - points the tool's own files back at the build installed here. Switching between the source build and the precompiled one leaves every Animation Workbench asset unreadable at once. Nothing is damaged; this rewrites the one line that went stale, and it shows you the count before it touches anything. It reaches you as a button on the screen that reports the problem. What it does

  • Compare Lite and Pro - the side-by-side table without running into a limit first: in Tools ▸ Animation Workbench ▸ Support this Project, under the Pro card in the Welcome window, and at the foot of the Settings sidebar, which also says which edition is installed. Until now it only opened from inside a feature dialog, so the one way to find out what Pro adds was to be stopped by something.

Improved​

  • Scene Edit puts the character there itself when none is selected. It was the button you could not press: it needs a figure in your scene that the clip can drive, and getting one there meant knowing which prefab belongs to the clip and dragging it in, all before any of the actual work started. The button now reads Scene Edit + and places the clip's own character in the middle of your view; a single Ctrl+Z takes it back out. Grey now means only one thing - this clip has no character that fits.

  • Rig Edit is quicker to work in. T and C for Trace and Chain, Ctrl+wheel to set a binding's capture radius without leaving the scene, Space to finish a chain, and the points you have already clicked stay visible through the geometry and numbered. Both tools switch themselves off once a chain is laid, and both write what they did to the console - bones, radius, and how many vertices the grip holds. The Original / Rigged switch pings the file it moved to, and the skinning preview no longer appears in your hierarchy.

  • Rig Edit binds better where it matters. The ends of a strand now hang on the chain that reaches them, so a bowstring no longer tears loose once the limbs travel. Where two chains meet inside one mesh - the two limbs of a bow, two fingers - the vertices between them go to the nearer chain, so the border falls on the midline instead of wherever the order of the list put it.

  • A pin that grabbed a prop says so, and lets go on the next press. The pin button reads Prop in green while the tip is held by one, and its tooltip names it. Pressing again keeps the anchor where it stands and turns it into an ordinary world pin; a third press releases it. There used to be no way back to a world pin except deleting it.

  • The review strip picks its moment. Right after the Workbench has taken real work off your hands - a mirrored clip, a batch of files imported - it names that instead of showing its general line, and it counts what you have actually done rather than guessing at it. The three numbers stay on your machine. Don't ask again now sits next to Later, and Later really only postpones: three times in all, and the last one says it is the last. Before, the second Later was a silent permanent no.

  • What's New no longer dead-ends. A Start Animating button opens the Workbench straight from the notes, and a link next to Documentation leads to the Asset Store page for a review.

  • The window tour has an eighth step, on Pose Edit and Scene Edit - the two ways to pose a character in the Scene view, with whatever keys they are bound to on your machine. The seven before it all explain the browser, so it was possible to take the whole tour and never learn that the tool edits poses at all.

  • An empty clip list says when the project is still being scanned. "0 matches" and "No animations in selection" read like an answer; while the library is still filling in they are a snapshot, and in a big project that goes on for minutes after the browser has opened.

Changed​

  • Rig Edit: dragging a bone that already holds a mesh now works like the Test slider - it deforms while you drag and snaps back when you let go, and the same goes for any link of a bound chain. Moving a bound bone never adjusted the binding, it wrecked it: a bowstring is captured at a radius of about eight thousandths, so a pull of ten centimetres leaves the chain lying beside the strand, and committing that writes a bone that has nothing to do with what it holds. Unbind flashes as it snaps back - press it first if you really do want the bone somewhere else.

  • What's New appears when Unity starts, and when you open the Workbench yourself - but never on a recompile. A docked window reloading is not an invitation, so importing an update into a running editor no longer risks a window over your work. At most once per editor session; on a fresh install the Welcome window still comes first and the notes stay away entirely.

Fixed​

  • Rig Edit: on an already-rigged character the bones could not be dragged at all, not even to see what they move - everything already in the prefab counted as "not one of ours". Committed bones get their handle back, with test only, snaps back next to the readout while you drag. Bones the tool never created - the arm of a bought character - stay untouchable here.

  • Rig Edit: a model whose own file sits inside _AWRiggedCharacters is found again. Anything under that folder was taken for a rigged version of ours, including a source you imported there yourself - so the switch went to Original and offered no way back, and committing would have created a second variant on top of the first. What counts now is where a prefab comes from, not where it lies.

  • Rig Edit: a new bone, socket, muzzle or IK target now lands where the mouse points. It was meant to sit on the surface under the cursor - a socket belongs on the palm, not a handle's width above the wrist - but that point was never found on the preview stage, so every one of them quietly appeared at the fallback offset above its parent instead.

  • Rig Edit: the coloured dots showing which vertices a grip holds were the first 400 in the mesh's own vertex order, not 400 spread across the grip. Vertex order is clustered, so a chain holding a whole bow limb showed a blob at the tip and nothing along the rest of it - the grip looked broken when it was fine.

  • Rig Edit: the first Apply rig changes on a character that had a binding but no painted weights failed with Creating asset at path failed and wrote nothing. The skinned mesh has to be written before the prefab that would bring its folder along, and that folder did not exist yet.