Quick Tip: Naming Bones “DEF-” “MCH-” and “ORG-“

Hey,

I bet you haven’t noticed this, when you have a rig, you can use a keying set that comes by default called “whole character“, this allows for you to hit i and get a keyframe on every attribute of the entire rig you’re animating, which is great, but sometimes you dont want to key everybone in the armature since some of them are just for deformation or just a helper for some kind of mechanism like IK bones… right?

Here’s the tip: add “DEF-” “MCH-” or “ORG-” to the bone’s name that you don’t want keyed with the whole character keying set, and there you go. This also works for the Pose Library.

It’s a prefix so it should go something like: “DEF-foreArmTwist.L”

As I’ve understood it these NAMING CONVENTIONS keep blender from autokeying the desired joints and help us all riggers keep our rigs organized in a way everyone should know, so:

“DEF-” stands for deformation, “MCH-” for mechanism, and “ORG-” for original as i’ve found after a lot of research.

There doesn’t seem to be any documentation whatsoever in blender’s manual about this but it’s used in the rigify addon, and blender riggers seem to know about it.

Till next time!

Thanks to @zuggamasta for reminding me about the example!