Need help with animation

Support Basics & Interface
1

I am a bit confused by the process of animating :frowning:

I have a character whom I want to animate, but I have a few problems. To start with I have several seperate meshes that I want to make into one mesh, so I can edit all of the vertexes at once (ie. assign the vertices to an armature).

I also don’t know how to actually assign the vertices to an armature. I’ve looked at tutorials but they havn’t been very helpful, they tell you what to do but not how to do it :expressionless:

Thanks

2

CTRL-J to join the meshes together - right-click one, press shift, then right-click the next. They should now both be purple. After that, press ctrl+j to join them…

To assign to the armature, you need to use vertex groups.
http://download.blender.org/documentation/html/x2016.html for an overview, if i find a tute, ill post it

3

Gah, I’m not having any joy here :frowning:

Once I figure it out it will be pretty easy, but I’m getting no where. I found a tutorial but I can’t parent bones to each other :<

I don’t know how to delete redundant Armature Datablock names either.

I think I’m going slowly insane trying to get this to work :expressionless:

4

I have a set of bones in a thumb in the model, and a couple of seperate bones in the palm. I can’t seem to parent the thumb to the palm, the Parent dropdown menu is blank

5

Armatures are a tricky one. You might want to play around with Blender some more to get use to the philosophy behind it before taking on this project.

At any rate… when adding bones to your armature, make sure that the armature is not only selected but also in edit mode. Otherwise you get a sepperate armature completely.

6

Hehe I’ve managed to get the lower legs animated correctly :stuck_out_tongue:

Not got Inverse Kinematics implemented yet but they can be added later I think. I’m having a bit of trouble getting the upper leg to animate though, despite only selecting the mesh up to the hip area, the upper body part of the mesh rotates when I rotate the leg :confused:

7

Haha, thats sorted now. Getting somewhere :wink:

How easy is it to implement Inverse kinematics later on? It’s something I’d like to do but I want to get the basic body parts animated to begin with

Thanks