Hi @aolean
There’s a few reasons to seperate control bones from def or mch bones. And yes, the main reason is to have only the bones that are to be animated visible for the animator.
You won’t really want to change anything ‘after the fact’ with the underlying structure of the rig, if the animators find something wrong with the rig it will be sent back to the rigger for them to fix, hopefully without breaking any animation that has already been done. The only ‘constraint editing’ the animator might do would be to add something like a ‘child-of’ constraint to a control bone For example, if a character jumps onto a skateboard or something, the animator can add a constraint to the control in the animation file and not the original rig file. (The rig is usually linked in to all the animated shots)
2) The Bone_top_squash would be more logical in the way mentioned. I had planned to add some drivers to control the scale_in and scale_out of the def bones so the t.chest could bulge in the middle. However, this took it from a beginner course to a more advanced course in complexity, so I edited that part out, but the initial foundation was left the same. (I think I refer to it somewhere in the video as ‘you will see what I’m doing that later’ and then you never do haha)
But that is some excellent thinking there. You should be trying to make it as simple and logical as possible.
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