I am trying to skin joe here. I used the ctrl p automatic armature weights. However I would like to clean up the skinning. A big issue I am having is the grey bones I can’t move with r key or with the mouse. I have to add ik constraints with a legacy solver to get any movement. With the newer solver its even wackier movement that is uncontrollabe. The bones aren’t staying in the mesh while using the IKs. What’s going on?[ATTACH]150043[/ATTACH]
I would like to clean up the rig by creating a couple different poses in extreme posistions. I don’t know how to store and retrieve poses. I also provided the blend file for a limited time.
Two problems here, first the rotation of bones (you can’t scale them either) is because you have ‘manipulate objects centers only’ turned one. In the 3d view’s header, between the viewing mode and the 3d manipulator controls and the controls for setting the pivot point, set the pivot point to be ‘median’ and to the right of that is an icon with 3 dots above and 2 way arrow, turn that off and now you should be able to rotate the bones.
2nd problem of the bones not staying in the mesh - also easy fix. Select the mesh in object mode and look at the modifiers panel, you’ll see to armature modifiers on the mesh, delete one of them. When you parent a mesh to an armature, blender auto adds the modifier, but if you clear the parenting, blender doesn’t remove the modifier, so if you re-parent the mesh again, ta-da, you get 2 modifiers.
sweet! that helps a lot. now how do I store the different poses to help with cleaning up the weight paints? also is there smooth weights tool to ease up areas with strong influence? I’m not really sure how to use the weight tools in 2.57.
Pose library is one way to store poses, but I haven’t used them, I just pose the bones. Another way would be to create an action of the character going from rest position to extreme poses, then just move the timeline around to cycle thru the action. To ease the weights, you might want to turn on auto normalize in the weight paint and just work at it. Weight painting takes time. Weighted vertices always add up to 100%. Say you have a vertex weight 25% to one bone and 25% to another bone, actually they are weighted 50/50. Same thing if a vertex is weighted 100% to one bone and 100% to another, here they are still 50/50. What auto normalize does is when you have a vertex weight 100% to one bone and start weighting to another bone, it subtracts from the first bone.
Generally, I’ll weight paint the character, then as I set up constraints and play with the rig to ensure it’s all working ok, I’ll spot areas that need help with the weight paint and fix them as I go. It’s not something that can be rushed!
I had to add a few bones. Especially chest bones and trapezius upper neck bones. Abs too.
I am making some pretty wacky poses in the animation timeline. But would still like to be able to save a pose created on frame 1 that is not saved (frame 1 i t pose) to the pose library. I want a jumping pose and clubbing pose.
Almost done skinning. Some strange areas around the skull lips and waist band. Not sure how to fix the head part where the bald head sticks through the hair piece. When the mouth comes up there is some really strange distortion around the mouth. IF you spot any other areas that could use tweaking I’m all ears. I changed the shape of the club. This newer skeleton is more complex and seem to have less issues than the first one with deformation. eyes are weird too.
I looked at this rig once or twice, but I’m having a hard time with it. The bones aren’t visible thru the mesh even with x-ray turned on. I can’t find a way to make the bones visible so I can select different bones while in weight paint. I’m thinking that’s the problem, weight painting, but as is I can’t work on this.
There is another issue with the eyes I didn’t see yet. I have done some clean up, but still have the problem spots around the hair and the head poking through it. For some reason the half shell eyes are not moving nicely. I’ve been playing around with track to deformers and changing the axis of the eye bones, but it still doesn’t move around smoothly. Perhaps I need to make the eyes more complete spheres? I was hoping I could stay under my 5000 tri poly limit.
Looked at this again, in the file you posted the head was showing thru the hair mesh at frame 18. Part of the hair that was weight painted to ‘R HAIR 1’ I weight painted to the ‘HEAD’ bone as well and that helped keep the hair from passing thru the mesh. The only problem I noticed with the eyes is when they are posed to extremes, you can see they are half spheres. Are the eyes ever going to be posed in such extreme poses?
Skinning is basically done. The eyes moved outward when added the tract to. Can that be fixed? How do I remove animation too? Also what should the eye control empty be parented to? The neck somehow?
Took a look at the last file. The eye movement is because of the track-to constraint and the empties that it targets aren’t exactly right ahead of the eye bones. Generally, I duplicate the eye bones and move them forward, then add a 3rd bigger bone between them, and parent the two small bones to the big center bone. Then set the rack-to constraints to use the two newly created bones. The center bone can be parented to the head, but then the eyes will move with the head when the head is moved. Another option would be to parent the 3rd bone to an extra bone that is the child of the hips, this way the eyes wouldn’t move when the head is moved. It’s all a matter of taste. Then you can create a circle mesh, just verts & edges, no faces, that can be a custom shape for the bone. For the third bone, create a mesh that looks like eyeglasses for it’s custom shape. Turn off selectablity, visibility, & renderabilty for those meshes.
