I’m following this video Royal Skies’ 2 minute video on rigging (can’t link because I already have two linked images in this post as a new user).
Close to the end of the video, he selects all the bones on the right side of the body while in the front viewport. When I do this, it misses a whole bunch of fingers. That’s not a huge issue but I’d like to know why it’s happening.
The next thing he does is use the auto name left/right option. So I try this after manually selecting the rest of the fingers that didn’t get selected and this works for me for the most part. Most everything gets “R” appended to the end, but a few of them (mostly fingers) end up with “L”. Also not a huge issue but I’d like to know what I’m doing for that to happen.
The next he does is use the symmetrize option to copy the bones from the right side to the left side, which for me doesn’t work. It just pops the bones out slightly from where they are originally and it’s backwards, like in the attached image. Is this because all of the names aren’t consistent with “R” appended to the end, or something else?
When I want to select stuff through other stuff, I always have wireframe view enabled, which lets me do that. (There have probably been some changes for how selections get occluded throughout versions. I use 2.79 interface, which gives me the handy ‘z’ default shortcut for wireframe.)
Your armature/bones aren’t oriented the way Blender expects. Your armature should have all rotation (and everything else) applied, and your character should be facing world -Y, with their left arms pointing toward world +X. Your image looks like your character is rotated, so it’s trying to mirror about the armature’s X plane, when your arm is pointing in the Y axis.
But yes, you also need proper naming.
Select armature in object mode, ctrl-a all transforms; snap cursor to world origin; enter edit on armature and rotate 90 or 270 degrees about cursor in world Z so your armature is facing world -Y; now autoname and then symmetrize ought to work properly for you.
