Rig-Rac UI - A Custom Rig UI for Blender

A little Blender Addon to quickly create a clean, more readable panel for your rig's bone collections !

Simply relying on a naming convention, you'll be able to:

• Organize your collections in any order you like
• Group them (or not) into collapsible sections (Body, Face, Clothes, Hair)
• Nest child collections in expandable sub-panels

This addon only works for Blender versions 4.1 and above (incompatible with bone groups from the previous versions).

The naming convention :

You'll only need to care about a prefix and (optionally) a suffix. The rest of the name is entirely up to you.

• The prefix : This determines whether or not the collection will appear in the panel, and on which row.If you want your collection to appear in the UI, its name needs to start with a number followed by a slash (see images below). Collections sharing the same number will appear on the same row, unless they contain children.
  • Expected name format: number/your_collection_name
  Ensure the numbered collections are arranged in order within the Armature Data Properties to maintain correct display in the panel.
• The suffix : If you want to organize your collections in different sections, you can add one of the following suffixes :
  • _bd, for body-related collections,
  • _fc, for face-related collections,
  • _clth, for clothes and accessories,
  • _hr, for hair and fur.
  The prefixes can start at 0/ for each section as they're independent.

• Child collections : Child collections are treated a bit differently. They also need a number/ to appear. The numbering can be separated from the main hierarchy.
  • e.g., parent = 5/Main_CTRL, children = 0/Top, 0/Bottom, 1/Left, 1/Right
  They do not need a suffix. They'll automatically inherit the one from their parent. After that, you need to go in the settings in the Ric-Rac UI panel, and click on "Add child collections" (see image below). It'll make the children appear in expandable rows below their parent."Shorter Subcollection names" will remove the parent's name from each child's, assuming the child's name contains it.

  

  (UI settings)

Example :

Full picture

In the following picture :

• DEF and MCH do not have the number/ prefix, so they will not appear in the UI.
• Root and All share the same prefix (0/), so they appear on the same row.
• Torso, Arms, Legs and Tail all have the _bd suffix, so they appear in the Body section. They also have numbered children, so they each get expandable rows to store them.
• In Arms and Legs, children have either 0/ or 1/ has prefixes, which results in two rows per parent.
• Face has the _fc suffix, so it appears in the Face section. Since it's the first collection from this section, its prefix can be 0/.

And this will be the result :

I originally made this little add-on to speed up my own workflow and keep things clean and simple, as I found the bone collections hard to manage once the list gets too long.

If you have ideas or spot a bug, don’t hesitate to share!