Hello. Is this a bug? It’s easily reproducable. Description would be: Blender release 2.79; When deleting ear bones from Rigify Human metarig to generate actual rig does not work.
To reproduce:
Add Armature, Human (Meta-Rig). In editmode, delete ear-bones. In objectmode, hit “Generate Rig” button produces stacktrace, where the final line is “KeyError: ‘bpy_prop_collection[key]: key “ORG-ear.L” not found’”
I have always been able to delete fingerbones if needed. And that works also now. I could just leave the ear bones there, but I think they are non essential, so they should be able to be removed.
I read today they are going to make a second release 2.79-a, so this could be fixed there.
You can delete fingers because the generate code is set up to allow that. To my knowledge, it is not possible to delete (or add to) any of the facial rig bones (pre-generation) without getting an error. It is possible to delete those bones after the rig has been generated. The ears should give you little to no problems, but altering anything else will come with some risk.
Move all of the ear bones out of the way of the head. Generate the rig, then delete the ear control bones, ear deformation bones, mechanism bones and org.bones. The last three layers of the skeleton should have the def, MCH, and ORG bones. The ear control bones should be on layer one and two.
Thanks DanPro. I was surprised about this. I have always thought that certain bones that are “at end” of the metarig bone chain can be removed.
Many times I have removed the whole face (or head??), because rigify fingers are great, but had my own face-rig. Now I was trying rigify face-bones for first time.