Hi. Probably a dumb question that has been answered here countless times, but here goes nothing…
I’m working on an elephant. I built an armature for the elephant. Then I parented the elephant mesh to the armature using using automatic. It’s all great, no taffy skin when moving the individual bones around or anything.
However, I realized that I need to add more vertebra, because I only have two (dumb, I know…) and when the elephant is standing as a biped (yes, it’s going to be surreal…) the skin on the back does weird things.
Okay. So, I cleared the parenting of the elephant from the armature. In object mode, I can grab the armature and move it around and the elephant doesn’t follow.
However, in pose mode, selecting a single bone and rotating, the skin still moves with that bone.
So, how do you clear the bone weight off bones so that I can re-parent the elephant to the armature automatically like I did in the first place, but after I add a few new bones in the spine?
(I put some extra vertebra in, but moving the individual spine bones around makes the elephant react as if it was still just two big spine bones…)
When you parent a mesh to an armature, blender automatically ads an armature modifier to the mesh. Then if you do the auto weighting, vertex groups are created for the bones. When you un-parent the mesh from the armature, blender doesn’t remove the armature modifier and does nothing with the vertex groups, so the armature and vertex groups are still there and still doing their jobs.
So in your case, after you clear the parenting, select the mesh and in the modifiers panel, delete the armature modifier. Then in the object data panel, delete all the vertex groups. Now everything should be cleared out and you should be able to parent the mesh to the armature with auto weights.
Ahhhhh. That’s right! Thank you!
It’s been a while since I’ve done any character animation, so I’ve gotten VERY rusty it seems!
Thank you, randy. I’ll give that a shot.
