Basic Rigging problem....

Okay guys, I’m looking for some expertise here. I’m rigging a simple low poly character just for use in the animatic shots. I’ve setup an armature and am weight painting the vertex groups and it works pretty well.

However I wanted to do something that seemed simple, and it’s screwing everything up. I added a master root bone in order to move the entire character. However, the way it is set up right now, it requires the weight painted vertex group to work. After I paint the entire character, the master bone works as expected. However now when I go to paint the other bones, the mesh gets moved away from the bone as if it’s offset. Any ideas guys? Thanks!

Attachments



shot05.blend (297 KB)

Instead of weighting for the master bone use the parent-child hierarchy. Turn off deform on the master bone and follow the child-parent bone to the highest bone; probably the hips. Then make the parent of the top bone your master root bone. This eliminates the need to weight paint the master bone and the armature will perform the way you want it too.
Hope that helps. If you want to see an example I can post a .blend.

hey there, several things that should help:

1 - you have the weight paint brush set to ‘add’. put that back on ‘mix’.

2 - the bone that is the root of all the other bones should not have any deforming influence on the mesh. if you make it apply full strength to the whole mesh, that’s just going to mess up every other bone, especially if ‘auto-normalize’ is on (under weight painting - leave this on though)

3 - the reason it seems to be offset is because, well, it is :slight_smile: go into pose mode, select all the bones, and give it the old Alt-R and Alt-G reset (this will clear pose rotation and location, respectively). Note that if you had every bone painted it would all line up, but it would still be offset and you don’t want to have to deal with that.

4 - i attached a .blend fix in case you’re still confused, though i would recommend fixing it yourself. in the edited .blend i weight painted the left arm and it seems to work fine.

hope that helps! good luck and get animating

shot05 Edited.blend (303 KB)

Thanks guys, really helpful advice.

@Jason, thanks for the step by step, I was able to get the root bone to not be weight painted, and then I mix painted the other bones as you described. Part of the issue also seems to be if some of the mesh is not covered by at least one bone vertex group.

@destray - you were definitely right, the offset problem was primarily caused by my parenting the mesh directly to the root bone in addition to applying armature modifier. Once I removed the parent relationship the weird offsetting issue went away.

Big help guys, thanks!!

i had the same issue for the first 6 months i used blender, with my 2core 3gig laptop… with every mesh. I just got a quad core 8gig and I am able to open thos messed up blends i have sitting here and actually fix, (and pose!) them…
Sounds like your problem has already been solved, but it’s food for thought.