How do I choose exactly which vertices are attached to which bones?

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hi everyone,
I am trying to animate like a mechanical thing I’ve made, and I really do need to choose exactly which vertices are attached to which bone. Is there just some way to select the vertices I want, then select the bone I want, and just attach them? I’d love to be able to do this without trying to fiddle around with complicated bone radius stuff and whatever, I mean this really should be a pretty simple thing to do, I just can’t work out what buttons to press :frowning:
Can anyone help?
Thank you all in advance for your great suggestions,
Captain Grimsdale.

P.S Gravy

#2

For things that flex (like people and animals) use Weight Painting.

For robots and machines that have rigid parts, select the object, then Shift-select the bone, then hit Control P and select Set Parent to Bone.

ETA: Your armature needs to be in Pose mode in order to select individual bones.


Steve S

#3

There are many ways to skin a cat. More different method you know, more resourceful one becomes.

Here is method using Set parent to “With Empty Weights”. With this option mesh object gets assigned with Armature modifier and vertex grope for all the bones. Vertex group however has no vertex assigned to it. When you assign vertex into those vertex group, you are associating bone to mesh. So all you do is to select the mesh, select vertex group from list, and hit Assign with full Weight of one.

http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/m626/cabby24/Blender%20Pics%202013/roborig_zpsd08a97fe.png

To make this process clean, mesh was built around the bone and not physically connected to other mesh parts. Then all you do is to hit [L] to select all the meshes to be controlled by particular bone