Custom shapes and their translations added to bones get deleted when merging rigs

[Jake]

Happens on 1.7.4

[Alessandro Padovani]

You first merge rigs then add custom shapes, this is not a bug. Unless you mean it’s a feature request for some kind of workflow which may be useful to others too. Otherwise please close as invalid.

[Jake]

Well that’s the thing, my workflow doesn’t allow merging rigs before doing changes to the armature, since I want to keep a version before I have merged any rigs in case I would like to change anything with the armature, and then do an additional scene with everything merged and finalized. And redoing the shapes every time I update the scene and merge the rigs is definitely not an option.

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I suppose it could be addressed if there was an option to copy the bone custom shape settings from a duplicate original armature, which has those custom shapes, to the merged rig.

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I also noticed that traditionally joining the armatures and manually deleting duplicate bones preserves the shapes, but sometimes I noticed it started complaining that the geograft I was merging was not a geograft and other times it was fine. The merge function is much more reliable.

[Alessandro Padovani]

The imported daz models include metadata used by the addon to work. That’s why for some operations as merge there are custom tools. Trying to do it with the blender tools doesn’t work the same. As for your feature request it’s up to Thomas to decide, but I fear it is not doable for the way drivers work, you need to merge first.

[Thomas Larsson]

Custom shapes added to the original rig were always preserved, because those bones are not changed. Now custom shapes of merged rigs are preserved too. Unless they were already present in the original rig, of course.