How can I make the Bones of rigged .fbx character visible in the editor mode so I can properly use em
Best chance here to get some editor feedback for the placement of your bone is to add a gizmo to your joint transforms: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Gizmos.html
You can even have a 3D shape as a gizmo, for instance a cube, and have a script automatically calculate the gizmo size and orientation by comparing the current joint with the child one(s).
It would probably take some time to tweak it all to perfection, so I'd only do it if you really need to check the "bones" in-editor for some very fine tuning. If you go for it, please consider sharing the script(s) with the community in Unitywiki. Good luck!
Bones are represented as plain transforms in the hierarchy view as children of the object the animation is on. You'll see the bone's pivot when you selected it's transform in the hierarchy view.
How would you like to "use them"? If you mean modifying the poses/animations, then you should do it in your animation application. If you mean playing animations, then you don't need to access individual bones. If you would like to attach an external object to a bone, so that it follows the animation, you can attach it in the hierarchy view, as described above.
Not the answer that the OP was looking for, but I pressed hide all gizmos to hide the bones of a Sprite Skin (2D bones), so I could see the details of my animation better - and then I couldn’t figure out how to show the bones again. Turns out I just had to open one of my Sprite Skin components on one of my Game Objects.
Writing this in the hope that this will help others with a similar problem, coming here from a search engine.
it just works!! thank you
I also try the Visible Skeleton script, that comes in the Adam Character Pack
If you want to see the bones in the scene view you can
1.Select your character in the hierarchy
2.Click Animation Rigging on the top, next to component and game object
3.Select Bone Renderer Setup
This should show your bones for your character