Automatic Weights (Unwanted result)

Hi all,

I have a simple animation including a bendy bone armature. Now I want to add geometry to this armature with the help of automatic weights. But as soon as I parent the object it behaves very odd (as seen on layer 6). Its hard to explain, so I included the .blend to clarify myself a bit. So please have a look at the file. Can anyone tell me what the right/easy way is to add the geometry?

ty very much for any useful input.

021218.blend (884 KB)

Most of the time, problems like this have to do with the weight painting. I’ve found that automatically assigning weights doesn’t work 95% of the time, so I have to assign things manually. Check your weights in the vertex groups panel and add/remove/change them on the mesh in edit mode.

You have to parent the mesh with all the bones in rest position.

Stuff like this you do not parent with ‘Automatic Weight’ but with ‘Empty Groups’.

Here’s the file. www.dolores74.com/blender/Bendy.blend

The bottom and top are parented to their bones with ‘Bone’

The flexible part is parented with ‘Empty Groups’.

You have done everything wrong what can be done wrong. :frowning:

I have deselected the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] bone layer so you’ll see only the handles.


Papa Mouse
http://www.dolores74.com

Part two, after further investigation of your file …

My dear Ray, you have done wrong just about everything one can do wrong.

@ First, if you have an armature, you animate objects with the bones, not the other way around. (Not in this case.)

Here is my conclusion of my reverse engineering of your file.

You have done the modeling, after the animation. The problem you have encountered was that you were not able to bring the bones back to their rest position with Alt + S,R,G. When you go back to object mode, to add a mesh and start modeling, the bones jump back in their posed position because they are key framed.

You figured to solve the problem, by modeling a mesh around your bendy bone in some posed position, using a curve. You converted this curve into a mesh and parented it to the armature.

No wonder things go wronky. How far am I wrong ?

My advice, always insert key frames for all the bones at rest at frame ‘0’.

I have made a little animation into the file I gave the link in my previous reply. When you open the file, click the play button. Hope you have fun :slight_smile:

Thanks for your answer, Safetyman.