Giant legs problem - Handling a moth

Support Modeling
1

Hi Folks,

hope I found the right place for this problem.

I am currently handling a model I downloaded from blendswap. Since I can’t post a link 'cause I’m new to this forum:
It’s the only one if you type “Moth” in the search on Blendswap Com.

First thing:
I’m trying to size it down. If I do, the legs of the moth don’t size down. I can’t select them individually. If I want to delete them (Would be sufficient since the moth will be small in this shot), Blender deletes the entire torso (body), leaving only wings. Tried to select the legs in Edit Mode, but the entire torso + legs disappear when I enter edit mode. Already tried all kinds of Hide/UnHide (Alt+H, Ctrl+H, Shift+H, H) :smiley: Anybody?

Second:
In another shot, there will be a swarm of moths. For them not to flap their wings at the same time, I want to make 10 copies of the same moth, offsetting the wing-swinging, then add a lot of children each copy. The children will form the swarm. Problem is, I cannot copy the entire moth including rigs, actions, animation… I can only copy the rig or the meshes. Can somebody help me? If there is a better way to achieve the same result, I’m open to every approach.

I’d share my own project file, but I’m not allowed to post links and the upload feature fails all the time. Hope that the model from blendswap is enough!

Kind Regards,
Dasepure

2

On blendswap, each link to a .blend has a number on the end. Post that number (example 85633 leads to http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/85633)

I can’t help you atm but i will try if no one has helped 6 or 7 hours from now (work and all that)
For the swarm of moths, you could add shape keys to the individual moths and then create a group for them which can then be hooked up to the particle system.

Attachments

Shape keys.blend (308 KB)

3

I imagine this is this rigged moth ?
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/81543

-this moth is rigged and so the objects are linked to the armature, so if you want to scale it down entierely, you need to scale the armatures too.

Active the layers with the armatures ( 3 layers ), select all ( Press the key “A” ) and scale all objects down including the armatures.

  • If realy you just want delete the legs, on the fie i have post, no problem, so re dedownload it, enter edit mode, legs are “separated mesh”, so easy to select them and delete them.

moth.png1292×686 127 KB

For the other part, sorry, but im not good with rigging.

4

Thanks to both of you!
Since I fixed the rescaling-issue by just upscaling the rest of the scene (camera, lights etc), @Lane’s solution did work for the legs. But this time the wings moved awkwardly at different times, sometimes even through each other when the model got too small. Upscaling the rest was easier, this time.

@DCBloodHound, it’s model number 81543 on Blendswap :slight_smile: Concerning shape keys: I didn’t know about shape keys until now. It seems to me they are just for animating and creating actions? Don’t get me wrong, the animation works - just the duplicating (which shall keep the animation so that I can offset it by myself) doesn’t work at the moment.