My empties are tearing up my meshes

Support Basics & Interface
1

On my rigged models I would like to use bones constrained to empties. (Of course …thats just the way it’s done right?)

The rig works just fine until I add the empty and then KaBlam! scrambled mesh.

The mesh seems to suck in most around the base of the constrained bone, and the vertex group gets twisted off at wierd angles that are not corrected bt rotating the empty.

I build my armatures normal to the X axis and have tried experimenting with…
(amongst other things)
Other build orientations.
Adding empties in various rotations germain to both the model and the absolute coords.
re-arranging the mesh orientations and root.
build sequence(empty/Arm/Mesh, Arm/Mesh Empty, ect)

Has anyone found a way to work around this? Am I missing something?

(I will be out of town for a few days, so if you answer and I don’t respond right away thanks in advance)

Here is an example of a mesh added to the bone controlling the skull (Nose to Nuchal crest) and the effect with and without the empty added oriented to the bone at the nose.
http://www.door3.org/EmptyTrouble.jpg

2

actually no, that’s not the way to work . Usually you use bones as constraint targets, since you can then manipulate them with the Action window, and it makes it compatible with the NLA.

Martin

3

Theeth you are awesome, you answered that post before I even finished writing it.

So am I reading you right to paraphrase by saying skip the empties?

4

Yes, skip the empties all the way.

Another thing, after seeing the image, I guess you used a Track constraint on the bone of the head, right? Try playing with the Up and Track axis combinaison in the Animation Buttons to fix that (soon to be replaced, but the new per-constraint settings have a baward compatibility autoconversion fix, so it won’t cause any problems with later versions).

Martin