My model has been animated for walking and jumping but she wears a separate hairpiece which simply will not follow the head from frame to frame. Stays inert.
I thought of parenting. The hair can be parented to the Body in Obj mode but won’t stay with the head. The ‘Child of’ constraint does not apply to two objects.
I wish to keep the hairpiece separate and not join it (Ctrl+J) to the body.
How can it kept in place without inserting extra frames?
Help will be much appreciated.
can you just parent to a bone in the head ? choose bone not armature or object.
I hadn’t thought of that, so I tried to parent the hairpiece to the head bone - but the hairpiece just disappears.
I next used the ‘child of’ constraint which can be used to treat Object (hairpiece) as child and bone as parent.
This immediately displaces the object from its position, typical of this constraint. One then restores the object to its original position by clicking the ‘Set inverse’ button.This I did BUT the object (hairpiece) simply disappaeared!
Wonder why - so I am back to square one.
Anyway thanks for your suggestion - any more thoughts welcome.
When you parent one thing to another it can often shift the location of the child because it is essentially changing its positional frame of reference to the parent. So in most cases it needs to be re-positioned due to the new frame of reference. A way to do this is to position the hairpiece where it needs to be before doing the parenting, then set the 3D cursor to the hairpiece’s object center, then do the parenting (hairpiece re-locates, possibly even out of view), then set the hairpiece’s location to the 3D cursor, bringing the hairpiece back home. This can all be done using the SHIFT+S options for snapping.
It’s also usually a good idea to Apply Scale and Rotation to the hairpiece before parenting.
Parenting the hairpiece to the head bone is a good method (if your model/armature allows this), as long as the hairpiece will always stay on the head. The Child Of constraint is useful if you need to animate the influence of the parent, not usually the case for a wig/hairpiece.
That did the trick, Chipmasque.
I parented the hairpiece to the head bone (as first suggested by Kasinger) but before that I transferred the cursor to the hair’s origin point (via Sh+S).
As expected the hairpiece disappeared right - out of view. I selected it from the Outliner and did Sh+S again (selected to cursor). Sure enough ity returned but quite ENLARGED. I had to scale it down till it was OK for the head. I note you had advised pre-scaling.
Then wonder of wonders, it stayed in place as I moved the model’s hips or feet.
That’s a relief - one is always learning from the experience of others.
Thanks, Chipmasque and Kasinger.
I am sorry to report that when the animation (walk) was initiated (Alt+A), the hairpiece left the head - it was barely visible for the first few frames but soon disappeared.
So the matter is not that simple, it seems.
And de-parenting the hair is a bit of a bother.
I’ve used the method I described for all my models, and they all move around a lot without hairpiece issues (and I use them for eyebrows and male facial hair as well as head hair), so I’m puzzled. Could you post the .blend for us to look at? Maybe there’s something I missed in the description that seeing your model will help reveal.
“De-parenting” has the same effect as parenting, the reference frame changes, so sometimes you have to compensate for that.
NOTE: While working on my own new character, I thought of something I hadn’t mentioned – your hairpiece should not have an Armature modifier on its stack. Its only influence should be the child/parent relationship with the head bone. I sometimes make my “wigs” by duplicating faces off the head of my character after it’s been bound to a rig, but forget to remove the Armature modifier and unneeded vertex groups. In that case the dual influence of parent and Armature can make things go wonky.
I have to second What Chipmasque just stated… with emphasis on the idea of ‘Clearing’ the modifier stack… before you parent… the hair piece (or really any object…) So… NO Armature modifiers and NO ‘Child of’ Constraints in the Constraints List… It took me awhile to figure this out on some Riggs I put together a while back…