animating a string: weight painting issue

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

I’m trying to animate a string attached to a balloon. I’ve applied an armature to the string because i’m goin to have a character grab hold of it and I’ll need to work with constraints later. I made the string out of a mesh object as opposed to a curve so that I could apply a subsurf to it, when i was trying to use a curve, every place the string bent left nasty ridges. (perhaps this isn’t the most effective choice? Im not sure).

Here’s my problem. I need the points where the string attaches to the balloon not to be deformable. Thus i figured I’d remove them from every vertex group with weight painting. But after doing so those verts are still influenced from other bones and still move away from the balloon, even after trying to remove the subsurf. So how do i do this? I dont know what else to try.

Thanks,
Decius

#2

I can’t fully envision what you’re doing, but why not have the balloon itself be attached to the armature also?

#3

the ridges in the curve are caused by not having your render resoultion up high enough. crank that sucker up and it will be super smooth. see curve and surface panel buttons.