octopus.zip (878 KB) I’ve got one that is WAY over my head,at least till I hear from one of you! Lot’s of armatures, spline I/K’s, and one heck of a mess when I try to ctrl/p with weights. What I want to do, as you can see, is to parent each leg to each seperate armature ( which, individually, have a path, a set of bones (splined) and 4 control bones that are hooked to it.
Weight painting doesn’t seem to work.
What am I doing wrong, and how do I make this work!
( I should have started with a pogo stick for my first attempt at animation! )
Thanks to all who try!
HUH? you have four different armatures three different octopi and i have no idea what is going on in this scene. wh ydo you have all these bodys and why are there random legs on different layers? make all the legs for one octopus and attach them to the body then start your parenting, and delete all the unnesecery garbage
Well, actually, the main body of work is on level 1. That’s where my question is. The other levels are ‘saved’ within the .blend, and have no effect on the question I’m asking. Thanks for the info though.
well, i shall look deeper into the file later tonight, but i suspect that having all these duplicates on different layers will be the source of your problems. we’ll see.
oh and i meant garbage in the sense of unnesesary stuff. not in the sense of belittling your work. (in case you were wondering 
)
You can’t have all the bones named Bone because then the mesh will only have one vertex group called Bone, which all the armatures will (try to) use.
Actually at the moment you don’t have an armature modifier on the mesh so add one of those and select Armature.029 or something.
You can see what happens when you parent the mesh to an armature (say Armature.029) with Empty Groups, select the bone in pose mode, select the mesh and press ctrl+tab to enter Weight Paint mode and try painting on the mesh.
If you want to use many armatures I think you need to weight paint. That looks like a years work. Auto weight I believe need one mesh and one armature.
I think You should just finish the mesh and join the armatures.
I think your mesh is more dense on the led then the body.
It looks good but its not ready. Where your legs and body connect looks uneven deformed.
You want the sk? For the stretch squish ? I ask because you can use 3 ik’s on the legs and get good control.
Still working on the octopus, might be in over my head, but we’ll see! Thanks for all the advice so far!
just use 1 armature, use edit, and extrude to set up the “arms”
after you have everything in place, parent the octopus mesh to the rig, and do auto weights,
if it looks funky, go though and paint weights for the sections that are goofy using the vertex group / bone selector,
octopus.zip (1.89 MB) I realize some of the mesh is not painted correctly, but a couple of the problems I’m experiencing are:
- When I grab one of the control bones attached to a leg in pose mode; g; move it a short distance and then right-click, the bone will return to the rest position but the mesh and the bones on the curve/path remain until I either ctrl-z, or grab another bone.
- I have for some reason an extra bone on the curve modifier that is reverse of the rest of the leg (near the main bone at the top) can’t see it in edit mode, but is clearly visible in pose mode.
Also, is there any other way to get the type of control I want on the legs withou using a cuvrve-hook-bone combination, cause’ it sure adds a LOT of bones into the works!
Getting closer, but these tiny little things are starting to drive me nuts!
Thanks