When deleting bones from a rig, it takes an awful long time because of the number of bones. When I click on a parent bone and hit delete, the child bones under it are not deleted, they just move up to where the parents used to be. Is there a control key that selects the parent bone and all the children underneath for deleting?

The trick is to expand all of the folders to show all of the bones you want to delete. Click to select the top bone. Shift-click the bottom bone and hold the shift button down until all of the bones are selected (this may take a few seconds). Once they are, then hit delete.

That sounds about right, but is there a way to expand all folders without having to go through each one?

I think you do that by selecting the top folder and hitting the asterisk key...

You can delete all the bones in a model by highlighting the Bones folder and hitting delete.

Hope that helps.

I'm trying to delete just a selection of bones from the squetch rig since my character does not have a face. I modeled a character based on the Bioshock game. Basically they are men walking around in big diving helmets.

The asterisk key did not work. I'm on a PC if that matters.

Expand out the tree of bones that you want to delete...if you want to do it faster, select the parent bone of the set of bones you want to delete and hold the right arrow key on your keyboard down. Just keep an eye on it, it goes pretty fast. Once you get all of the bones you want to delete visible, select the top bone, scroll down to the last bone in the chain and select it while holding down the shift key. Once they are all highlighted, hit the delete button and wait until they are cleared out.

Hope that helps, Eric.

That's the answer I was looking for - hold the right arrow key to open the folder structure.

Thank you David.

Zombie thread! Sorry for digging it up from its grave, but I found this while searching for the same answer, then discovering the answer in A:M, so I'll bump the thread just to help other members.

To instantly reveal all of the child bones, it is the asterisk on the Num Pad. This, for me, is even more handy than holding the right arrow key.

I didn't know that, Dale. Thanks! It will help a lot.