Why do armature conventions place the armature facing the negative y-axis?

It would appear that armature (auto-naming at the least and perhaps other) conventions place a conventional character (a hominid for example) with the left appendages in the positive X axis and the right appendages in the negative axis. As such the front of the body is facing the negative Y axis. I suppose one can claim this is just a matter of preference but it appears to make no sense to think about an object moving into the negative y axis when moving forward.

  1. I haven’t looked at a high enough number of publicly available models/armatures for blender, but is this characterization accurate in that the expected workflow is for models to be generally facing the negative y axis?
  2. If my memory serves me right, the default blender start up file has the x axis pointing to the south-west, the y axis pointing to the south east. One would think a convention would be to model with objects either facing the positive x axis or the positive y axis. It seems strange to jump into a blender file to be greeted with the back of an object.

it is all relative!

this is how blender works
so follow the wiki tutorial on rigging and you will understand how to work with it

happy bl