Armature layers (the 32 little dots) and bone groups are replaced with
Bone Collections:
- Bone collections are stored on the armature, and have a name that is
unique within that armature.
- An armature can have an arbitrary number of bone collections (instead
of the fixed 32 layers).
- Bones can be assigned to zero or more bone collections.
- Bone collections have a visibility setting, just like objects in scene
collections.
- When a bone is in at least one collection, and all its collections in
are hidden, the bone is hidden. In other cases (in any visible
collection, or in no collection at all), the bone visibility is
determined by its own 'hidden' flag.
- For now, bone collections cannot be nested; they are a flat list just
like bone groups were. Nestability of bone collections is intended to
be implemented in a later 4.x release.
- Since bone collections are defined on the armature, they can be used
from both pose mode and edit mode.
Versioning converts bone groups and armature layers to new bone
collections. Layers that do not contain any bones are skipped. The old
data structures remain in DNA and are unaltered, for limited forward
compatibility. That way at least a save with Blender 4.0 will not
immediately erase the bone group and armature layers and their bone
assignments.
Shortcuts:
- M/Shift+M in pose/edit mode: move to collection (M) and add to
collection (shift+M). This works similar to the M/Shift+M menus for
objects & scene collections.
- Ctrl+G in pose mode shows a port of the old 'bone groups' menu. This
is likely to be removed in the near future, as the functionality
overlaps with the M/Shift+M menus.
This is the first commit of a series; the bone collections feature will
be improved before the Blender 4.0 release. See #108941 for more info.
Pull request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/109976
998136f7a7