Whats the easiest way to animate a rigid 3d body, like a robot or something. Right now I just linked the objects together and moved their centre points but I’m not sure how to animate it. I could create bones and create a vertex group for each object but thats a lot of work for what should be fairly simple. Is their any easier way to link a object to a bone segment?
If you have the object centers of the various meshes in the “correct” place, i.e. so the they hinge/rotate properly, then there is really no need to assign an armature to get an animation . Just key the transformations directly …
But if you want easy access to the character animation system (Action Editor/NLA etc.) then using an armature is easy to do if you have individual mesh objects that are not joined .
Once you have setup your armature just go into Pose Mode and then select the object/mesh you want to be controlled by an individual bone then shift-select that bone and Ctrl-P -> Bone . Do this for each object and corresponding bone and the objects will move with the movement of the bone .
there’s Envelopes that do the vertex assignment for you.
thank you, I didn’t know I had to be in pose mode to link them,
also I have tried to used enveloped for both rigid and soft body animation but generally fount it to work terribly and vertex painting to be a very slow and tedious process to get right