Bones On Black Spruce Mountain

Getting Started With Bones On Black Spruce Mountain

I ran into this workflow a few years ago when I was trying to speed up a production pipeline that was choking on asset loading times. The short version: Bones On Black Spruce Mountain is a custom toolchain for rigging and animation batch processing, built around a modified version of Blender's Python API with some custom C++ nodes for the heavy lifting. It's not an official release — you're compiling from source, pulling it from a GitHub repo with sporadic commits, and hoping the environment variables line up. Here is how the install actually works, not the README version. First, you need Blender 3.6 LTS or later. The tool hooks into the ARMATURE operators and overrides several default behaviors around bone constraint evaluation. You clone the repo into your scripts folder, run the setup script, and then there is a dependency on a package called meshconv that does not appear in the requirements.txt until you try to use the export function. That tripped me up on my first two attempts. I ended up installing it separately with pip before the pipeline would even recognize the bones rig file. Once it is running, you feed it a .blend file with an armature, set your target frame range, and hit batch. The tool strips constraints you don't need, bakes the pose data down to keyframes, and exports either a FBX or glTF depending on your config. The whole thing takes maybe 30 seconds for a 200-bone rig that would normally take five minutes to bake through standard Blender operations. That speed difference matters when you are processing dozens of characters per project.

There are edge cases. I hit one where a rig with mixed IKFK switching broke the exporter because the tool does not handle dynamic constraint toggling during bake. It assumes all constraints are static across the frame range. My workaround was to manually pre-bake the IKFK transitions using Blender's normal system first, then run the export through the tool on the already-baked file. It adds a step but saves you from the error. The developer acknowledges this in the issues tab but has not patched it yet. Three years have passed since that note. The real value here is when you are doing batch exports for a game engine integration. You can set up a JSON config file that defines bone name mappings, scale factors, and pivot points for each rig type. Once you write that config, you can point the tool at a folder full of mixed rigs and walk away. It will process them all, validate bone hierarchy, and spit out ready-to-import files. This saved our team probably 15 hours a week on a mid-size mobile game project. The initial config took a day to get right, but after that it ran clean for months. Limitations are worth being honest about. The tool is single-threaded on the export side, so large projects with hundreds of rigs still take time. It only supports Blender's native armature format — if you are using Mixamo rigs or some other third-party framework, you need to convert those first. There is no GUI beyond the standard Blender interface, so every setting is a text edit. And the error messages are bare minimum. When something fails, you get a Python traceback with no context about which rig or which bone caused it.

If you need a more mature alternative, Rigify with batch export add-ons covers about 80 percent of what this does and has better community support. But if you are already deep in a Blender pipeline and need raw speed on repetitive bake-and-export jobs, the Bones On Black Spruce Mountain tool is worth the setup pain. Just read the issues before you install it.