Rigging question about Spline IK and having all controls on one armature So, i'm finally getting a handle on rigging in Blender and am doing pretty well except for one thing. My brother is doing the animating and had a few complaints/requests, so I went in and tried to fix it.

The spline IK controls have to be on a separate armature than the other bones. My brother would like all the controls on the same armature so he can access all controls at once and have them all on the same list in the dope sheet.

I tried creating all controls on a separate armature for the rig, but this results in double tranforms for everything and i'm having serious trouble keeping things parented. The finger controls won't follow the wrist control for example without throwing the deformation rig out of wack (with childof constraints on the fingers, and the controls for the fingers parented to the wrist, it just doesn't work)....

Is there a way to do this? (have all controls including splineIK on the same armature).
It's possible, here is a flow chart of the dependencies:




You want all your bones in your Control rig (deform and non-deform), except your Spline IK bones.
The control rig will control Curve vertices with Hook modifiers.
The Curve controls IK Splines in deform rig. You want to copy all the deform bones from Control rig to Deform rig and copy transforms from Control.
The Deform rig now should have all the bones to deform character. Bind the mesh to this armature.
Parent everything to Control rig. You can hide the Curve and Deform rig from view and render.