Workflow Enhancements

CloudRig includes several quality of life features, each with a default hotkey. If these interfere with your workflow, you can easily rebind or disable them in the preferences.

MetaRig Swapping / Generation

• Toggle Meta/Generated Rig (Shift+T): Toggle visibilty and selection state between a metarig and its generated rig, syncing visibility of bone collections and bone selection. This can be used while a mesh object is selected, to hop to Pose Mode on its deforming armature.
• (Re-)Generate Rig (Ctrl+Alt+R): Generates or Re-generates the active rig, or the active metarig's rig. If there is only one metarig in the scene, it doesn't need to be active.
• Push Bone to MetaRig: This operator found in the CloudRig header menu lets you save some clicks when wanting to transfer a bone from the generated rig over to the metarig, which you might do when you made modifications on the generated rig, and want to keep them when re-generating.

Rig Preview

While editing a metarig, you can see a live preview of the rig which will be generated. In the Overlay pop-over, you'll find settings for how many components should be shown, and whether to use dashed lines. Drawing all visible components on a complex metarig can introduce lag when posing.

Scale Custom Shapes (Ctrl+Shift+S)

Shown in the above video, this hotkey lets you scale the visual sizes of bones. This works well together with the Rig Preview, so you don't need to re-generate the rig all the time to see your changes. You can also hit the X/Y/Z keys to scale on those axes. The operator can also be found under 3D View Header -> Pose -> Transform -> Scale Custom Shapes.

Smart Rename (F2)

In the 3D View only, this hotkey masks Blender's built-in Rename operator to provide more convenient renaming in the case of symmetrically named objects and bones. Renaming of the opposite item can be toggled off. You will also see a preview of the result of the renaming, which may not be what you asked for, as the desired name might be occupied. In this case, the names are incremented with CloudRig's name increment rules, as opposed to Blender's .001 suffixes.

Better Duplicate & Extrude

• E (Extrude) and Shift+D (Duplicate) increment bone names:
  • Duplicating Bone1 creates Bone2, not Bone1.001.
  • Hold Alt while confirming to keep the original numbering.
• Handles occupied names: if Bone2 exists, it creates Bone3.
• Supports symmetry: increments names on the opposite side.
• Shift+D also copies drivers on bone and constraint properties.

Bone Selection Pie (Alt+D)

Select bones related to the active bone. Available in Pose, Weight Paint, and Edit modes.

• Up/Down: Select a bone with a higher/lower number in its name, e.g., from Hair1.L to Hair2.L.
• Left/Right: Select the parent bone or a child bone. Multiple children are shown in a drop-down menu.
• Top Left/Right: Select bones that target or are targeted by this bone via constraints.
• Bottom Left: Select the start and end handles of Bendy Bones.
• Bottom Right: Open a pop-up menu to search for a bone by name.

Bone Specials Pie (X)

Bone deletion and symmetry.

• Toggle Armature X-Mirror: Toggle symmetrical armature editing.
• Toggle Pose X-Mirror: Toggle symmetrical posing.
• Delete: Deletes selected bones and their drivers. Works in Pose Mode. Indicates X-Mirror status to prevent accidental deletions.
• Dissolve: Dissolve selected bone heads and tails. Connected chains remain connected. Works in Pose Mode. Indicates X-Mirror status to prevent accidental deletions.
• (Enhanced) Symmetrize: Works in Pose Mode. Symmetrizes Actions of Action Constraints. Attempts to symmetrize drivers.

Bone Parenting Pie (P)

Quickly parent and un-parent bones without having to enter Edit Mode.

• Clear Parent: Clear the parent of selected bones.
• Selected to Active: Parent all selected bones to the active one.
• Disconnect: Disconnect a bone from its parent without un-parenting, allowing free translation.
• Parent & Connect: Parent selected bones to the active one, and connect them to the parent.
• Active to All Selected: Parent the active bone to all other selected bones equally using an Armature Constraint.
• Parent Object to All Selected: Parent selected objects outside of the active armature equally among all selected bones using Armature Constraints.

Edit Custom Shapes Pie (Ctrl+Alt+E)

A comprehensive toolset to manage bone custom shapes.

• Edit Properties: Quick access to custom shape and bone color properties.
• Unassign Custom Shape: Remove the custom shape from selected bones.
• Assign Selected Object: Set the selected mesh object as the custom shape of selected bones.
• Reload Custom Shapes: Reload widgets from the Widgets.blend file, discarding any modifications to them.
• Edit Custom Shapes: Enter mesh edit mode on the selected bones' widgets. Press Ctrl+Alt+E again to return to pose mode.
• Select Custom Shape: Assign a widget from a library to the selected bones. Local objects named "WGT-" will also be listed.
• Duplicate & Edit Custom Shapes: Duplicate selected bones' widgets before editing them. Handy when you want to edit only one usage of a widget, not all of them.
• Copy to Selected: Copy the custom shape and transforms from the active bone selected bones.

Personal Custom Shape Library

If you'd like to add more custom shapes to your workflow, you can simply browse any .blend file containing objects named "WGT-something" in CloudRig's add-on preferences. If you'd like to have icons for your custom shapes, you can use the "Render Bone Shape Thumbnails" operator, found under 3D View Header -> View:

If you'd like your widgets to play nicely with the dashed lines feature of the Rig Preview, you will need to include a script which you can find as a Text datablock in CloudRig's own Widgets.blend file, which you can find in Cloudrig/rig_component_features/widgets/Widgets.blend. You can find the install folder of any add-on in the add-on preferences. This is needed because for dashed line drawing, the geometry of the bone shapes must be topologically ordered.

Bone Collections pop-up (Shift+M)

A pop-up menu to access bone collections without leaving the 3D View. Available with the rig, even if a user doesn't have CloudRig installed.

Quick Select (Shift+Alt+W)

Pops up a list of collections that were marked to be included in this list. Clicking on one of them selects the bones within. Shift+Click extends the selection. Ctrl+Click symmetrizes the selection. Alt+Click deselects the collection's bones. Available with the rig, even if a user doesn't have CloudRig installed.

Improve Link/Append

This user preference tweaks Blender's linking and appending behaviour to make it slightly more convenient:

• When linking a collection which contains armatures, the collection and the armatures become automatically overridden and selected.
• When linking or appending armatures which have runnable Python scripts attached, they are automatically executed.