at the moment I’m researching the best approaches
to rigging for my purposes in a long term project
concerning procedural crowd animation.
What I would like to be able to do is assemble rig components,
so I can design e.g. hand, shoulder, leg, etc rigs separately, then
build a complete rig from the bits.
At the moment, I have leg and hand rigs I’m happy with for now,
and I tried object-parenting a simple shoulder/arm rig to the hand rig.
This operates fine when translating in object mode, but fails to remain
connected when I pose my shoulder.
If anyone is familiar with this type of workflow and knows how
I should approach it in blender, I welcome any suggestions.
For what you want to do, you should be joining these separate armatures/rig-components into a single armature instead of merely parenting them together. Remember, in Blender, if you want to animate something, it is usually best to make it part of a single armature.
Thanks for the advice, I’ve done some further research on this, and gotten results with this approach, though my redundant object/parent relationship caused some absurd translation problems.
I believe if I take a few steps back and correct the workflow I’ll get the results I’m looking for. I also discovered some rigging issues in my hand armature, and the need for constraints in the shoulder that needed work, so I’ve made a lot of progress.
Also, meshes can only be deformed by one armature at a time, so a many to one relationship between rigs and skins wouldn’t work anyway.