Optimal method for hard surface bone parenting

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’ve been watching some tutorials for rigging hard surface models (e.g. a piston), and for parenting the objects to the corresponding bones, it seems like there’s two methods I’ve seen:

  1. Select object and corresponding bone → set parent to → bone. example
  2. Select all objects and armature → set parent to → Armature Deform with Empty Groups (then manually assign each object to the corresponding bone using the vertex groups). example

Are there any downsides to one method over the other? Any reason why I shouldn’t use one or the other? I’ve started experimenting using (2), but I could see how this could get cumbersome for models with lots of parts to assign. (1) seems like it could be a little quicker.

2

Welcome to BA :slight_smile:
1 is definitely quicker, I’d recommend it for hard surface stuff. I find method 2 best when you have something weird you need to weight paint onto a character rig and you know automatic weights aren’t going to be even close, it’s definitely not a general purpose rigging option unless you really enjoy weight painting (and I don’t think anyone does :wink:)

3

Thank you! Definitely leaning more towards option 1 now.

4

One benefit of option 2 is that when you change bones position in edit mode the geometry stay still, while when parented the geo follow the bone.

But , since in a mechanical rig you don’t need to edit pivot point, you can probably safely stick to option 1

5

You can get that with bone parenting by parenting bone relative. Which is what I always do.

There are some issues involved in changing object space with bone parenting vs. armature deformation; usually, bone parenting gives you what you want, but there are times that you want something in its undeformed space.