I thought it was possible to add additional armature to a model that has already been ‘fully’ rigged, but nothing I’m doing is allowing this. I’m trying to create an IK chain to control the tongue on an completely modeled and rigged figure. I’ve created the bones, indicated what bones should effect which vertices in weight painting, but can’t get the bones to recognize the vertices. If I apply armature again, I loose all the work I’ve done fine-tuning weight painting and position of the existing armature. (my original – and better - concept was to control the tongue with a mesh deform modifier, but that still leaves me with the adding-to-the-armature problem).
I suspect it something I just don’t know about or have overlooked. I’ve tried everything I can think of, hoping you more experienced out there have some ideas…
How are you creating the new bones? Normally, when I rig a character, I rig the body first and have only one single head bone, and weight paint the entire head to that one bone. Once finished with the body, I start rigging the face/head by adding bones to the existing armature in edit mode. Once I’ve added all the bones for the mouth, I jump into weight painting and with auto-normalize turned on, as I weight paint the new bones, weight painting is subtracted from the head vertex group and vertex groups for the new bones are created. Then I’ll move onto adding bones for the eyebrows, weight paint them, add eyelid bones, weight paint them, etc, etc…
If your adding the new bones by adding a new armature object, it can work that way too. You’d have to add a new armature modifier for the new armature object, but I’d advise against working this way. While it can certainly work this way, (you can have any amount of armature objects controlling the same mesh), the weight painting could become a PITA. If parts of the mesh to be controlled by the new armature object are already weight painted to the original armature object, once weight painting them to the new armature object, you’d have to exit weight painting, enter weight painting for the original armature object and subtract weight from those verts you just painted to the new armature object. This can become quite tedious to fine tune the weights.
If you’ve already created the bones as a new armature object, you can join them to the original armature object by first selecting the new armature (in object mode) then select the original armature, and do a ctrl-J to join them into one armature object.
randy - thanks, I’ve been adding bones to existing armature and adjusting in weight painting. I forgot to check auto-normalize (never would have remembered that, thanks!), restored all the weights to the main head bone, then re-painted for the tongue - but no change, bones still wouldn’t effect the mesh. I worked on it every way possible and just before giving up for the day, went back to an older file, created new bones, and everything worked perfectly even before adjusting weight painting.
I - don’t - know - what - to - say :spin: