Improvemets to the Outliner hierarchy, and parenting one object to another object

Hello, people of Blender! I'm still relatively new to the Blender scene, but I've been able to pick it up pretty quick thanks to customizing the controls to resemble that of Source Filmmaker. I've actually learned quite a lot on my journey of understanding the Blender counterparts of things in SFM, however, although Blender is 99% better than sfm, there are just 2 little things that the 2012 abandonware does better than Blender that I think Blender could some improvements on.

1. Let's start with the bone hierarchy.

TLDR version: Better bone hierarchy for selecting and finding bones in the outliner.

This is the bone structure in Source Filmmaker. As you can see, everything is neatly organized. The "Body" group houses things that go to the main body, such as the pelvis, spines, head, and neck, the "Arms" bone group has bones such as the collar, upper arm, lower arm, and hand bones; bones that go with the arms, and the "Legs" group obviously does the same thing for bones that go to the legs. There are also subgroups, such as those in the "Face" bonegroup.

The structure in Blender, however, is not good. Say I want to click on the bip_head bone. I first have to drill into bip_pelvis, then bip_spine_0, then bip_spine_1, then bip_spine_2, then bip_neck, and then I finally arrive at bip_head.

If I parent the pelvis to the hand_ik bone, that's another bone I have to go down just to get to bip_head.

As you can see, I tried to simulate SFM's setting by using the bonegroup option in the Object Data properties panel, but selecting from the bonegroups doesn't work from the Outliner.

I know I can just select the bones in the viewport, and you can do that in SFM as well, but I'm just not a fan of selecting bones in the viewport when animating.

2. Now that that's out of the way, time to talk about the Armature constraint.

In Source Filmmaker, we call this way of parenting "Locks"

Locking a bone to another bone on the same model, OR a different model is very easy, you just drag and drop it onto the target.

Locking a bone to another bone on the same object is fairly straight forward in Blender; You just click the target bone, then shift-click the bones you want to parent to, then press CTRL P, and click Bone Relative (Or Keep Offset if you're in Edit Mode)

Locking one object to another object, or a bone on one seleton to a bone on another skeleton, however, is needlessly complicated in Blender.

In Blender, however........

1. Click on the armature or object, in object mode. If the object is an armature, go into Pose Mode.

2. Click on either the Object Constraints tab, or the Bone Constraints tab. They both share most of the same constraints.

3. Click on the Armature modifier under the Relationship category.

4. Click on the Add Target bone option, then select the bone or object you want to parent to. If wanting to lock to an armature, select the desired bone.

5. After you've got the parenting set up, go back into Object Mode...

6. Select the object or armature you just defined as the target, then go BACK into Pose Mode.

FINALLY, move the target or target bone, and it will move the original object where you activated the armature constraint in the first place.

Again, to lock something to something else in Source Filmmaker, all you have to do is click on the object, and drag it onto the other object.

I would really love to see these two improvements in Blender the most going forward, as these are the only two things that Source Filmmaker does better than Blender.

I've also linked the official tutorial for locks in SFM if anyone wants a video explanation.

youtube.com/watch

Not sure if I can post multiple ideas in one post., if someone could let me know if I should break these ideas into separate posts, let me know, and I'll edit accordingly.