In a template file I have a dog ear rig working as required. When rotated the ear flaps out to the side, without deforming or changing the ear mesh and moves it as expected. However, in my animation file (see screen shot), the bones move away from the mesh and undesirably deforms the ear and I have tried everything to figure out why it isn’t behaving the same way.
I checked all the settings in every menu thrice, I checked the weight painting but nothing different there. I checked all the bone rotations were the same, bone roll doesn’t correct it and deform should be ticked or it doesn’t move at all.
All I did to get the rig into my working file was append the Collection with all the rig assets inside. I have done this with another character and no issues, so I am at a loss as to how to get the ear working as intended.
If anyone may know of something, any help would be greatly appreciated.
There are a lot of constraints, and not a lot of info there. The best thing to do would be to find a hosting site, upload your file, and post a link here.
(I know it’s frustrating not being able to upload files or images as a new user, but I imagine that the moderators have to deal with a lot of problems with spammers, and I’m personally grateful that they offer so many tools like easy image upload, file uploads, gifs. It’s a lot easier for me to demonstrate problems and solutions here than, say, Reddit.)
The ear has a lot of double transformation from head_Bone and head_neck_Bone. If you select head_neck_Bone and disable deform in the bone properties, then select the verts of the ear and remove head_Bone vertex group influence, it should work.
Thank you for the response, its most appreciated. I will certainly try this and let you know how I get on.
Please can you clarify what you mean by double transformation, and how I would have got this, just for my learning
Is it to do with the overlapping on weight painting, that also influences the vertex groups, correct me if I am wrong - still learning to resolve issues such as these.
A bone will transform the vertices that are part of the parented mesh’s vertex group with the same name as that bone. If you enter edit mode and select one vert of your dog’s ear, you can see, which bones it is influenced by.
here you have the ear bones controlling the vertex to some degree while the neck bone and head bone have full influence (telling it to stay in place). Of course you want to move the ears when the head moves, but that happens anyway because the ear bones are parented to the head bone.
If you enter edit mode you can easily select the ear by pressing 3 (face selection) place cursor over ear and press L (set mode to Seam in the little popup that appears down on the left if necessary)
now search for the groups in the vert group list that you want to unassign and click remove.
(Also I’d recommend disabling ‘Lock Object Modes’ (located in edit menu in header) Now select the armature, enter pose mode, shift select the mesh and enter weight painting. That way you can select and transform each bone and the mesh will show how much influence it has over which verts)
Cool. Glad I could help. You usually don’t want the sum of weights for a vertex go above 1. There is an option to normalize your weights in the weight paint mode but it wouldn’t have worked here, I think.
