Bone Engraver

BONE ENGRAVER TOOLKIT — TECHNICAL FUNCTIONALITY DESCRIPTION

Bone Renaming Tools

Bone Renamer
 A tool that allows users to create a rename mapping for bones in an active Armature, and apply this mapping either locally (to a single armature) or globally (across multiple actions and rigs).

Bone Name Transfer
 A utility designed to transfer bone names from a source to a target—either from another Armature or an Action as long as it has matching Likness and the same rig.

Global Rename Across All Actions
 An advanced batch tool to rename bones across all actions in the entire Blender file, targeting consistency in animation names and channel paths.

 Auto Sync Bone Rename
 A synchronization utility to ensure that renaming operations are mirrored across Actions, Drivers, and NLA tracks in real-time. It's a hands free switch to activate and forget. Example activate and rename bones as you go, through the properties panel or just by the F2 shortcut. With this enabled it will give a history list of what you changed as well as update everything like the tools above.

What These tools affect:

• Updates Drivers and Constraints with bone reference paths when applicable.
  
  

• Renames bone keys across all animations
  
  

• Updates F-Curve references scene-wide
  
  

• Handles interlinked animation strips (stashed, NLA, linked duplicates)
  
  

• Optionally caches the mapping for repeat jobs

  Demo here for Bone Renamer

BONE REORDER TOOL

Bone Reorder Tool

provides a full user interface inside the N-Panel under the “Bone Engraver” tab. It is specifically designed to allow users to manually reorder bones inside an Armature data-block, using a familiar outliner-style hierarchy viewer and a controlled export-import workflow.

This reordering system is useful when dealing with:

• Broken bone orders from imported files (e.g., FBX)
  
  

• Mismatched rigs
  
  

• Game-engine compatibility constraints (e.g., bone index dependence)
  
  

• Manual override of auto-sorted Blender bone trees
  
  

It is not just cosmetic — Blender stores bone order in a fixed internal list, which can affect:

• Export behavior
  
  

• Parenting logic
  
  

• Animation data consistency

Use Cases for Game and Asset Pipelines1. Game Engines with Index-Based Rigging

Some engines (especially custom or in-house ones) expect bone order to match a predefined rig file. If Blender exports a different order—even with the same names—those engines canl apply animations or weights to the wrong bones.

2. Interoperability with Middleware

Programs like MotionBuilder, Unity with Mecanim, Unreal’s Control Rig, or custom retargeting tools sometimes cache bone arrays by order. If your rig comes in with an unexpected order, you’ll get:

• Misaligned animations
  
  

• Broken IK/FK systems
  
  

• Bone constraints referencing the wrong targets
  
  

3. Rigging Cleanup and Standardization

Reordering bones allows you to:

• Group bones logically (e.g., spine group, limbs, facial controls).
  
  

• Ensure all exported rigs follow a consistent layout, regardless of modeling/import history.
  
  

• Eliminate issues from rigs imported from FBX, where the bone order may be reversed or chaotic.
  
  

Why This Tool Matters

This tool gives you full control over something Blender doesn’t expose: the actual internal order of bones. That means:

• You can match bone order to existing rigs from other tools.
  
  

• You can fix inconsistent rigs caused by third-party exports.
  
  

• You gain predictable behavior when exporting to animation pipelines, especially ones that rely on order for correctness.

  Demo here for Bone Reorder

BONE MATRIX MAPPER TOOL

Bone Matrix Mapper

It  is a specialized toolset inside the Bone Engraver add-on, created for the capture, analysis, remapping, and restoration of bone transformation matrices in Blender armatures. It is especially tailored for workflows involving FBX imports, pose correction, and animation transfer, where the transform state of bones needs to be consistently preserved or restored.

It is designed for technical animators, riggers, and pipeline developers working with imported assets (such as FBX from Maya or game engines) where bone orientations are incorrect, axis misalignments occur, or animation channels become corrupted due to mismatched transforms.

For controls you have

Fix Pose (Single) - This changes bone by bone orientation to align towards the proper direction and alignment of the proper flow of bones and direction each bone should face. The same functionality as automatic bone orientation but more precise.

Fix Pose (Multi) - This changes bone by bone orientation of multiple selected actions to align towards the proper direction and alignment of the proper flow of bones and direction each bone should face. The same functionality as automatic bone orientation but more precise.

Warning! If you change the bone orientation of just the armatures the animations that were connected to it will be broken. You have to process all animations along with the  armature for the animations to play properly. Multi pose fix should mostly be used unless you're working with just an armature and a single animation.

Restore Pose Single (FBX) - Restores the rest-pose bone matrices (Edit Mode bones) to a previously stored backup from before re-orienting the Armature.

Restore Pose Multi (FBX) - Batch restores selected actions to the previously stored backup from before re-orienting the Armature.

New Animations processor -  This is for if you import an armature into blender and then fix its bones orientation. Then create an animation with it but need to switch that new animation's bone orientation to fit what the armature was imported with. This will create a version of the new  animation with your bones in the original orientation that the armature was imported as. The armature must start in the Fixed position this is assuming you created the animation to be processed in that position

Demo here for Bone matrix mapper