Hi everyone, over the past few days I have been running around in circles trying to resolve what seems to be a common beginner issue, but ultimately unable to comprehend a fix based on my searches. In short, the foot and the shoe mesh move when meshes are not joined with the body but the shoes fail to move once joined. I have applied all transforms using CTRL + A, and have not touched the weight paint tool. Please see below for details and the Google Drive link containing the Blender file and a more detailed description and pictures
With the amount of time I have spent on this, I would be and if allowed by the ToS to compensate you for your help. Thank you in advance.
The reason that the shoe moves with the foot bone is that it is bone parented to the foot bone. Although it has an armature modifier, that armature modifier is not doing anything, because no vertices in the shoes have been assigned to any vertex groups.
An object can only have one parent. When you join the shoe to the body, there’s no longer anything parented to the foot bone-- the shoe is now, like the body mesh it joined, parented to the armature object rather than the foot bone.
To solve, from the file you’ve provided, join the feet to the body. Then assign all vertices of the left shoe to “J_Bip_L_Foot” vertex group, and all of the right shoe to the …R_Foot.
I appreciate the offer of compensation. This took me less than a minute to diagnose, another minute to compose this message, and I wouldn’t think it right to accept any compensation here. But the offer means a lot-- it shows respect for people’s time, efforts, knowledge. If you want to hire me for anything else, including tutoring, feel free to write.
Oh, and I hope it’s not disheartening to spend a lot of time and then get it solved quickly. It’s okay to ask for help earlier. But it’s also not a bad thing to work hard on trying to solve your problems yourself. You always end up learning something. 3D is complicated, nobody is born knowing how all this weird stuff works, and I know, from my own experience, that it takes some time to learn it.
Thank you so much for the response and appreciate your help. I tried joining (CTRL + J) the foot (shoe) to the body, but once the shoe-mesh joined the body-mesh, I was unable to locate the shoe to assign it any vertices.
I would also be interested in taking Blender lessons ad-hoc as well. Thanks in advance.
Once you join the shoe to the body, it’s part of the body-- those vertices are on the body object. They’re just the vertices that used to be part of the shoe. You’ll be assigning vertices to a vertex group, not the other way around. Another way to do this is to create those vertex groups and assign the vertices before joining.
If you’re interested in tutoring, it would probably be easier to show you over a shared screen or something. I’ll message you. (But also, if somebody needs free help, in writing, I’ll do that too-- that’s why I’m here.)
My apologies, I’m coming up short still, but would be very interested in a shared screen session. I will compensate you for helping me; please let me know how I can proceed. Thanks!