Bone rotation behaviour based on hierarchy of individual bone axis like Maya

Question

There's a feature in Maya which I don't know if Blender can do regarding bones.

In Maya you can select a Parent Joint (or bone in Blender), and afterwards if you select every child joint (bone) in order (from parent to child) and execute a simple rotation using the rotation gyzmo, the whole joint (bone) hierarchy rotates according to the axis of each individual joint which is a feature very useful when creating fingers, because you can understand how rotation is behaving.

Can Blender do something similar to understand how bones would be rotating depending on hierarchy (besides turning on "Axis" in bone parameters and assume what the rotation would behave like when exporting to other softwares like Unity)?

EDIT: I'll provide more information since I believe I'm a bit unclear:

In Maya, if I select all bones individually (I used "select Hierarchy" for fast selection) and rotate them, they behave as expected given their individual bone axis. But if I mess up one bone axis, the rotation misbehaves badly (which is to be expected)

In Blender, if I select all bones individually with individual selection, the rotation behaves similar to Maya, BUT, if I alter a bone axis with the roll and replicate the rotation, it behaves as if I hadn't altered any axis.

In Maya is pretty obvious to understand how a bone will roll, but I don't know if there's any way to visually understand this in Blender like in Maya (aside from watching the axis and assuming how the whole system will behave).

Thank you

Answer 1

Set the gizmo to manipulate all the selected items individually:

If you want the gizmo to act on each bone's local axis, rather than global, set it here:

It will take bones roll in mind.

This is however not a very convenient way to rig fingers. The easiest is to use Rigify and create finger rigs with it:

I need to add finger rig to a model that is already rigged

The idea is to have extra controls for rough pose and also access to individual bones for fine tuning.

It can be driven through constraints or with drivers, it can behave like this:

Answer 2

To rotate multiple bones around their local axis you have to set the following.

• The Pivot Point has to be set to Individual Origins, since the bones should rotate around their "individual" origin each.
• The Transform Orientation has to be set to Local. Otherwise the bones would be rotated around the global axis which is the same for every bone, regardless of orientation.

These settings are found in the header bar of the 3D viewport.