I am testing bendy bones. I have a character that I have rigged with the Pitchipoy version of Rigify rig. Before adding skinning, I stripped out the facial rigging. I skinned it, created a bendy bone for a face control. I parented it into the rig and now I am trying to skin the bendy bone. It will not skin. I created a vertex group for bendy bone and it still will not work. I even tried unparenting the mesh and reparenting it with the bendy bone as part of rig. It still will not skin. Could this have anything to do with the fact that the bendy bone is contained in it’s own armature parented to the main rig?Any ideas on what I can do to get this to work? Thanks.
Could this have anything to do with the fact that the bendy bone is contained in it’s own armature parented to the main rig?
Absolutely…
I’m not sure if two Armatures can share the same Mesh… I believe there would be some problems with Blender being able to calculate which Armature was to take precedence at any one time in the animation…
I’m pretty sure what your wanting to do is combine your bendy bone setup into the same Armature as your original Armature… this is quite easy…
Select your Bendy bone Rigg… then Shift Select your Original Rigg… and hit Ctrl+J to ‘join’ the two Riggs into one…
you of coarse will have to do some vertex group adjusting and weight painting…
in future… simply select your Armature and Tab into Edit mode to add a bone… instead of adding that bone in object mode…
I am seeing a problem. I got it to work in clean file, so I am tracking down the issue. On another note, I tried to import a bone armature from another file. It seems “Append” is not working or I am doing something wrong during append.
I had some kind of transform on bendy bone that was messing up when I joined. I brought in an untransformed bendy bone and joined it to my rig. It immediately dropped the bendy bone display and turned into the octagonal representation of the parent rig. This kinda makes sense. I am assuming that joining will not work here because of that. Any thoughts?
Sorry I"m just now getting back to this… been busy with work…
When I join the two armatures, the bone in question disappears. I tried this with a simple bone and it disappeared also. Why?
will try this out myself to see what I can come up with… I’m using Blender 2.78a
Okay… yah… when you Joint two Armatures together… you will need to…
With your Armature selected >
goto the Properties Panel > under the Object Data (the little man icon) > find ‘Display’ > and select the ‘B-Bone’ button in that panel…
The " bendy bone " display is not the problem, right now. BTW, I have switched to basic Rigify rig. The problem is when I join (Ctl-J) any bone, bendy octagonal, etc. to the " DEF " bones of the Rigify rig, it will disappear. In the past, I solved this by attaching bones for tail (my character has a tail) to the metarig, so that when it generated the rig, it generated the tail bones. This time, I am trying to attach bones after the generate for facial controls and they are vanishing. I am wondering if I need to create the bones in the metarig and then convert them after I have generated the rig. This is getting very complicated:eek:
When you step up the Meta Rig… then do the generate… it’s only going to generate the bones it knows to generate…
so yes… any addtional bones you add … must be added after you do the Generate…
at least that is my understanding of how it works…
I rarely use the MetaRigg stuff myself… (I’m so use to building my own Riggs… )
but I think the MetaRigg stuff is great stuff to use once you know what it does and does not do…
it can get complicated…
I think too many people think it’s a ‘quicky’ solution… and I am not so sure that is the case…
I also think that there needs to be a comprehensive ‘guide’ written just for MetaRigg…
other wise … the tool kind of becomes useless…
when I join (Ctl-J) any bone, bendy octagonal, etc. to the " DEF " bones of the Rigify rig, it will disappear.
let me fully understand when you say… disappear… you mean the bone just completely disappears… It doesn’t just convert back into a Octagonal displayed bone…
because if it does just convert back into a Octagonal displayed bone then… honestly… the issue is a ‘display’ problem to some extent… because you can only see the results of your bendy bones in the B-Bone display mode… plus… If I am not mistaken if you do not use the B-Bone display with Bendy bone it’s my understanding that Blender will interpret that as you not wanting to use the Bendy bone feature and will not calculate it in… (I may be wrong on that) because I almost always use B-Bone display at a certain point in my Rigging work flow…
however… if then… and forthwith…
If your having bones completely disappear that is a completely nother issue…
Before we assume that you have completely lost a bone in the join process… be sure you check all your bone layers…
Remember that bones have a completely separate set of Layers from Objects… To view these you have to see them on in the Properties panel…
Armature selected > Properties Panel > Object Data Tab (the little man Icon) > Skeleton > Layers
Thanks Norvman. I will check the layers, but yes it completely vanishes. I never thought it would chuck it into a layer. Using Rigify or Blenrig is, for me, a " quick " solution. I have done my share of rigging in Maya and Max and I am more into animating than rigging. Rigging has been a means to a goal. I was trying to avoid it in Blender because the Rigify (and Pitchipoy) and Blenrig scripted rigs are pretty awesome, overall. I wanted to move to bendy bones because they are more exciting than the traditional bones for facial work.
I have done my share of rigging in Maya and Max and I am more into animating than rigging. Rigging has been a means to a goal.
Fantastic!!! then you shouldn’t have much problems catching on to the basic concepts of Rigging in blender…
I have worked with Maya, Max, XSI, and LIghtwave… I find Blenders Character Rigging system to be a pleasure to work with… (with or without using the Riggify Riggs) …
yah… Bendy Bones are what I’m trying to play around alot with now too… Bendies have actually been in Blender for quite awhile… it’s just that reciently there have been some really nice tweeks to them that have made them soooooo much easier to setup and use…
Anyway I did not get a chance to test out What Riggify is kicking out bones on the Join command… with have to test that out tomorrow… gotta hit the sack… I am bushed for the day… I at least have a an animation hitting the Renderer to night so not like I won’t be productive in my sleep…