I need to do an animation for homework and am a complete beginner in Blender.
I need a rig for my model and after automatic weights I noticed that most of my rig hasnt been weighted, I guess it has something to do with the too thin bones. I tried to scale them but it somehow doesnt work. I scale in edit mode and already searched through the web but couldnt follow the guides.
Can someone please help me. Im really exhausted with Blender at this point.
Take a step back, take a deep breath, and relax. Be calm and throw on some relaxing music…
Now, onto your problems, and you have a lot of them, but easily fixed.
There is kind of a golden rule in blender when rigging - Both the mesh object and the armature object should have matching loc/rot/scale. Your file is a mess when it comes to this. So follow these steps -
Shift - S → Cursor to World Origin. That will snap the 3D cursor to the center of the 3D world. Now select the main mesh object - Cylinder.030 - and in the Object menu at the top of the 3D view - Set Origin → Origin to 3D Cursor. Now CTRL-A → All Transforms. Now your character’s mesh object has it’s point of origin at the center of the 3D world, and it’s loc/rot/scale has been reset.
Select the armature, Object menu → Set Origin → Origin to 3D Cursor. CTRL-A → All Transforms to reset the armature object to match that of the mesh object.
Now, notice the black line running down the center of your character’s torso? That means there is a problem there. At the top right of the 3D view, there is a menu - Show Overlays, (icon of a solid circle and a circle outline), click the down arrow to open the menu. Check the Face Orientation check box. Your mesh will now have blue and red colors. Blue is good, the face normals are pointing the right direction. Red is bad.
Enter edit mode for the mesh, select all verts with A-key, then do an ALT-N → Recalculate Outside to correct the face normals.
Now try the whole Parenting With Automatic Weights thing again, and it should fix most of your problems.
There’s nothing “auto weights” does that you can’t do manually. I usually start by creating a single vertex group for an important bone -say the hip bone- and assign all vertices to it. It has to have the same name as the bone, that’s how weight assignments work in Blender. Then go into weight paint mode and create a new brush in “add” mode, with weight 1, pressure off, and a constant falloff. This will let you paint vertices 100% to a single bone, without any sort of gradient. Make sure “auto normalize” is on in tool options, and you can start selecting other bones and painting. The reason why we’re doing this instead of assigning weights “by hand” in edit mode, is because there is no auto normalization there. It’s only in weight paint mode. And you want your weights to add up to 1, otherwise the model won’t deform well. Once you have roughly painted your character, you can go in with a regular “add” brush with smooth falloff and pressure sensitivity and smooth out the transitions.
I now have more or less a working rig with the ape but the roller skates still trouble me. I dont know how to parent them in a way that they move with the bone without flexing. Also how can i make the wheels spin
This becomes a bit complicated because there is more than one way to do this. The shoe part should be able to deform at the top, but the bottom part shouldn’t deform because it’s flat and attached to the under carriage of the skate.
Go into weight paint mode, enable Auto Normalize, and paint your weights like so:
That will fix the shoe part. Now for the under carriage of the skate, you could paint the entire thing red with the foot bone (Bone.006_R.005) selected. The wheels should also be painted red to the foot bone, and no other bones - the back wheels are weighted to 2 different bones.
My preferred way of doing this would be to separate the under carriage part of the mesh into a new mesh object, then just parent the new mesh object to the foot bone. You’d want to do this parenting to the Bone, and not Armature Deform like you have did with the rest of the character. And parent the wheels to the new under carriage mesh object. If using this method, remove the armature modifier from the mesh objects. Of course, using this method, you’d want the armature to be in it’s rest pose.
Also, you character mesh object and the skate mesh objects have double armature modifiers on them. One has a red icon indicating it’s not working, so remove it.
This can become a bit complicated for someone new to this stuff, so first ask yourself if you even need to do it? There are no identifying marks on the wheels so would you even notice them spinning?
To get the wheels to spin constantly at one speed is simple, insert 2 keyframes for rotation and alter some settings. To get the wheels to spin at different speeds during animation, or change direction, that becomes a bit harder to do, lots more keyframes needed.
