System Information
win 7 x64
Ubuntu
Blender Version
Broken: 2.79 RC2 and 6859695
Worked: 2.78c
Short description of error
Its changing the .L/R but its not removing the .001 (.xxx) number of the bone that its generated after copying it.
2.78c
2.79 RC2 And above
Exact steps for others to reproduce the error
Confirmed. This behaviour looks wrong/incorrect to me.
Although @Bastien Montagne (mont29) mentioned in T51543 that this sort of behaviour is apparently how it's now supposed to work, I'll take a look at what's going on here, as the current behaviour doesn't look very useful at all.
I think Flip names does what it should do currently - flipping names, not trying to change names to match (and usually fail in all but simplest cases) some mirror pattern.
IMHO, here we'd rather need a new 'Copy Mirror' operator, that would properly duplicate and rename bones at the same time? I cannot really see how we could achieve a proper 'name mirroring' a posteriori anyways, too much corner cases that would break such attempt.
"IMHO, here we'd rather need a new 'Copy Mirror' operator, that would properly duplicate and rename bones at the same time?"
Symmetrize is doing that already by it's symmetrizing it at the same time.
your right, just a few adjusts in the documentation and hints should fix the misunderstanding.
The functionality its there, bad report on my part sorry.
Symmetrize doesn't necessarily solve the problem, as it needs a root bone/object to symmetrize against. See my .blend on T52671 for a case where Symmetrize wouldn't work at all.
I feel like T50393 was the corner case (selecting both sides of an armature and doing flip names? Who does that? And WHY? And Dalai had dismissed it as not a bug at the time) and fixing it broke the standard use case. Flip names worked the way it worked at least since 2.49, and nobody minded.
i have looked at https://developer.blender.org/T52790 and at the documentation, and for me this is still a bug. i following a lynda.com blender rigging tutorial that uses v2.72 and i have done exactly what the instructor has done and his 001 numbers get removed and mine do not.
Encountered the bug while following this tutorial:
https://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/building-a-basic-low-poly-character-rig-in-blender--cg-16955
Step 30 You will notice that the new bones have a .l.001, .l.002...extension. Press W and click on Flip Names. This will replace the .l.001 to .r (right).
Your problem is not a bug, it is blender that is getting better, do this:
Go back to the step 17: after selecting those bones hit 'W' and from menu chose symmetrize. Then Continue from step 31
As you can see back when that tutorial was made, Blender didn't have symmetrize.
Symmetrise for bones has existed for over 2 years since 2.75. the flip names tool working correctly was an additional feature which worked and was very useful. For example in the case that symmetrising using the armature's origin, as it does is for some reason not available, the 3D cursor could be used to duplicate and scale across to achieve symmetry not connected to the object's origin.
This is not an improvement, it is a regression.
@Olson Burry (olson) having a generic tool broken to support a specific use case in relation with another tool, even is that use case is common, is not a feature, it is at best a very bad hack.
That being said, proper solution here is to add option to duplicate tool to flip names immediately.
Also added back as an option to strip numbers from flipped names in operator, option to be used only with sane bone naming scheme (else numbers between both sides are likely going to get incoherent).