[Pro Tip] flip controls selection & add opposite.

One of the things I love about animating in blender is because the way the rigging system has been thought of for having sides and blender acknowledge those sides has made blender have built in tools that you find in some studios, in many they work poorly or slowly but its a problem that in the end each studio tackles their own way, so the great part about blender is that it’s not an issue so nobody really needs to do anything to improve much on it, they just use the built in way.

So if your rig is correctly setup for left and right, you can easily, mirror poses, copy poses and paste to the other side, copy paste animation mirrored, even helps you name half of your rig correctly or mirror the complete rig correctly.
but when you’re animating one of the things i tend to do a lot is to want to select the opposite control, which by default is CTRL-SHIFT-F — who knew that! right?!

because that isn’t enough I’ve always wondered how to add to that selection, so i asked a friend @quollism and he found a way by just assigning a new hotkey to the thing!

Here it is:

go to your User Preferences, Input, open up 3D view > Pose > Flip Active/Selected bone.

Open the little white arrow next to the toggle, Hover over  the identifier operator that reads “pose.select_mirror”

Now add a new operator, some weird will happen, when you add a new operator the search gets emptied so now go 3D view > Pose and in the end of that list your find your new “none” operator

Paste the identifier operator on the “none” one and turn on the “extend” option

I personally use the hotkeys Ctrl+Shift F for this operator that adds the opposite control to the selection, and Ctrl+F for the original one that flips to the opposite of the selected control.

Save your user preferences.

Now you can easily flip your control selection from left to right, and also add the opposite control to the selection!

Lemme know what you think, if you have similar tricks also would be great to hear!