Wolfmikey.blend (852 KB) I’m a complete amateur, so excuse if this is completely off the wall. I did searches etc and have not seen any solutions; I suspect I am doing something really basic wrong. The scenario is: Starting with a mesh, I built an armature, then created an animation of a walk cycle. I got it to a decent (amateur) level, but in mucking about with weight painting I did something bad. Not sure what, but from then on whenever I play back the animation, the mesh and the armature are separated. Correspondingly the weights are completely off – what starts out as a wolf looks like a spider in animation.
Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me. I’ve attached my humble effort for perusal.
Hey cool looking wolf 
Your only issue is that the origin of the wolf has moved off the origin of the armature, you need them to be matched up. So first you want to move the wolf along the x, y and z axis so it’s lined up with the armature. Then next, for some reason it keeps jumping as soon as you start playing the animation, this usually points to three things; origins are messed up, it’s got key frames or it’s got parents with key frames. So I checked all of those, and it’s origins have been fixed, it had no key frames and it still jumped when the parents were cleared. So something weird is going on. That empty you’ve got by the feet is doing something, and I’ll tell you how to fix it, but I’m not entirely sure what caused it.
So after aligning the mesh to the bones select the empty and hit Shift+S and “cursor to selected”. And then select your mesh and hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C (best shortcut ever) and select “origin to 3d cursor”, then do the same for the armature.
And hopefully it should stay put, there’s just a few issues with the weight painting on the back legs, and I’m curious as to how you got the whole thing is made out of triangles. But hopefully it’s all solved there, if not just stick any problems on here and I’ll see how I can help.
Good Luck
I appreciate the advice very much, and I will give this a whack as soon as I can get back to Blender. To be clear, I didn’t mesh the wolf – it is as I remember available for download from the blender repository. If not there, then another web site. … I’m learning to navigate Blender and am starting to be comfortable (as opposed to frustrated) experimenting, but so far my meshes are no better than my meatspace scrawlings. Will post feedback shortly. THANKS!
Your fix worked! Thank you! It seems like the sequence of commands to align objects would be something everyone needs written on a sticky note somewhere.
- Select something
- Shift+S/cursor to selected
- Select the mesh or object to be aligned
- Ctl+Alt+Shift+C/origin to 3d cursor
- Repeat prior two steps for any other object to be aligned at the same location
As far as my rigging/animation, I am spending a lot of time on doing the weight painting, with only minimal improvements. I plan to tackle it by placing the animation at a place where there is significant distortion, then select each vertex group in sequence and review the influence. I can remove any obvious wrong influences if there are any. I hope that will fix the bulk of the issues. If not, I assume that the normal thing to do is to continue tweaking until all is good. … My fear is that it will continue the way it has been to tweak one bone only to find another whacky distortion crop up. But, am I on the normal path for fixing bone weights?
Again, Thank you!