Rigify – If it aint broke, don’t fix it….

Ive just finished rigging a character with rigify in Blender 2.79 and after downloading 2.79 just last night, I really wished I had used 2.78 to rig him as there seem to have been a lot of changes to Rigify in 2.79 and I personally am really not liking it. 

Now im no pro, so maybe these changes are for the best, but I wanted to share my thoughts here to see what everyone else who uses rigify thought. The metarig I added in BLENDER 2.79 is highlighted below so there is no confusion : 

Ok , so ive only just started playing about with the rig after auto-weighting it to my character, and here of some of the things that bother me , I would appreciate anybodys views on these issues : 

1. There is nolonger a head and neck bone in the metarig, well there IS , but they are now named spine.004 , Spine.005 and Spine.006 respectively .  Last time I checked, my head was called a head , because it is a head 😛 , call a fork a fork and all that……. if you ask me , thats just confusing for no reason , or is there a reason ?

2. The foot on the metarig has changed , not sure why. But heel.01 bone is nolonger needed it seems, but heel.02 is still there , aptly called heel.02 still , just to confuse you more…..as there is no 01 as far as I can see….

3. We seem to have lost the really handy (pardon the pun) scalable bones for opening and closing the fingers…. I personally found this very efficient when animating, but alas they have vanished….. Now the only similar way to achieve this that I can see, is to select each finger bone one by one and rotate all on local X axis with individual origins – which seems very convoluted , and really fun for tweaking in the graph editor….. 

4. EVERY bone on the rig (and controls) are set to quaternion rotations with all axis unlocked… Now surely , since bones such as the fingers, elbows and knees only rotate on a single axis unless you are in a very painful accident, then surely it would make sense to have these as euler rotations with Z and Y axis locked? 

Maybe im wrong, maybe this is not Rigify and just some new addition to Blender that I was unaware of, , maybe the changes are great and for good reason, and im just being very ignorant. If so , then I apologise for my moan, but in my view, the one in 2.78 was great and these changes just seem silly. 

I would appreciate any input to see what others think, Thanks in advance 🙂