How do I get these leaves to parent to this stem for easier animation?

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m just learning some basic animation, so I took an old potted plant model of mine and put an armature through it’s stem. I parented all the leaves to the steam. But when I move the stem using the armature, the leaves don’t follow along. How do I get it to do that? I’m new to all this. I’m just looking to make the stem wave back and forth a little bit like in the wind, as a test to make sure I’m understanding the animation tools etc.

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2

QUOTE]I parented all the leaves to the steam. But when I move the stem using the armature, the leaves don’t follow along.[/QUOTE]

I guess that the stem geometry is parented to the armature ‘with automatic weights’ so the stem is deformed along with the stem bones. This overrules the object parenting of the leaf geometries to the stem geo, --> the leaves stay in place while the stem deforms.

To remedy this I can think of 2 ways:

  1. add bones for each leaf (or couple of leaves on the same level, depends on how flexible you want to stay with later animation) which are parented to an according stem bone. This lets you also animate the leaf bones if desired…

  2. No additional bones, but join all the leaves and the stem into one geometry. Then weight paint the leaves to their according stem bones with 100% influence per leaf - stem bone. With this method you can’t really control the movement of the leaves. Only over shape keys, or weighting painting them not entirely 100% to one bone… cumbersome.

So I’d definitely go for the 1. suggestion.

3

in addition:
for 1) I’d also join the leaves and stem into one geometry. Forgot that…

4

Cool thanks for the help! I’m new to this so i don’t yet have my workflow all worked out. So your suggestion is combine everything into one mesh (using something like boolean union right?) and then put bones for each leaf right? That sounds doable.

Combining all the meshes will loose all the painting and uv information I had for the mesh. That’s not a bug deal as I can repaint stuff. Though I’m a little unsure of how to repaint stuff with everything being so visually cluttered. When each leaf is a seperate mesh i can make it invisible and paint the leaf it’s obscuring but with everything being the same mesh that seems kind of hard. How does one get around that?