"Merging" two armatures?

Artistic Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m learning how to rig in Blender by going through the gingerbread man tutorial in the manual. I made a mistake somewhere, though, and ended up with the bones on the left side being in a different armature than the bones on the right side. So I have one armature with Arm.R, Thigh.R, and Shin.R, and a second armature with Arm.L, Thigh.L, and Shin.L.

If I understand correctly, I really want to get all those bones into a single armature, right? Is there any way of “merging” the two armatures into one, or telling a bone “OK, I don’t want you to belong to armature 1 anymore, I want you to belong to armature 2 now”? With a project this small, it would be pretty easy to scrap the bones and start over, but in a larger project that would be throwing away a considerable time investment. So I want to learn how to do it “right”, which would include fixing mistakes like this. How do you transfer a bone from one armature to another?

2

Select (use shift to select multiple) the armatures in Object Mode and hit ctrl-j, enter to join the armatures. The last selected armature is considered active (same concept works generally for objects) and previously selected ones are merged to it.

<edit>Note that you can use the same method to merge other objects as well.</edit>

3

That was exactly what I needed. I don’t recall the Join tool (Ctrl-J) being mentioned in any of the tutorials I looked at, so you just added a very useful tool to my toolbox. Thanks!