Hello,
My mesh, a chain, needs to be animation-ready.
The lattice deforms the chain but ignores bones parenting.
The deformation mesh is parented with bones without problem but then that’s the chain that ignores the mesh deform (normals are outside, the bind is “calculated” but… nothing, the chain doesn’t change at all).
I will run out of hairs XD
Can’t say why your mesh doesn’t respond to the mesh deform without the file.
For lattice interacting with armature, it’s hard to say exactly what your plan is, but there are two general ways to handle this. One way of doing it is to have a static lattice, and lattice deform before armature deforming. The other way is to have the lattice parented to a bone, and then lattice deform after armature deform.
Well, the examples I’ve found use lattice. Mesh deform was just because I’ve seen some suggestions but it was for characters animation.
I have the lattice and the chain is able to follow it.
Now, comes the question how do I parent bones? I mean : the lattice is supposed to deform the chain and the bones to serve as handles to deform/animate the whole thing (chain within the lattice).
Usually parenting is select child first, then parent and activate parenting option but… nothing happens.
Since it is some kind of “snake shape”, do I create the “bones snake” in edit mode or do I have to create individual bones, make dependencies (parenting between bones) and then parenting the lattice?
I start to feel confused.
If your goal is to have the lattice deform the chain, and you want to control how that lattice deforms the chain, then you can give the lattice an armature modifier and weight its control points to bones.
That would be instead of bone parenting; but to bone parent, select an object in 3D viewport, shift select an armature in 3D viewport, enter pose mode, select appropriate bone, ctrl-p → bone relative.
But there is a lot of vagueness in what your intended outcome is here, and a file or more explanation would go a long ways. There are many different ways to achieve any particular outcome.
Here is the file.
I wish to be able to animate the chain using bones. Imagine a ninja weapon or these kind of things. For any rest pose, a curve and soft body would be enough, but for animation and character parenting, unless I’m wrong, I will need bones.
chain_to_rig_joined_V2_lattice.blend (3.9 MB)
Sometimes you’ll want or need to use bones, but it doesn’t have anything to do with whether you’re animating (you can animate a lattice just fine) or whether you’re parenting to a character (you can parent the object and lattice to an empty, then copy transforms from the character’s hand to that empty):
If you decide that you want to animate this using bones, I would not involve the lattice at all. I would make a long chain of bones and then just armature deform the chain. Here’s what it might look like:
There are variations on this; you could use more bones, you could control your bones with spline IK. I’ve made a long string of bones, weighted a subdivided cube to it with autoweights, and copied weights from that cube to the length of chain. You can see the lattice modifier is disabled.
Edit: Likewise, a mesh deformer works here; maybe you weren’t using a good deformer. (A mesh deform requires a mesh object made up of manifold meshes.) Here it is, mesh deforming from the cube I made, which is armature deformed, instead of armature deforming the chain directly:
I get your point.
The thing is I have the wish to make chain as smooth, as natural as possible. Bones are kinda straight.
I know we can export armatures based on bones but is it possible with lattice?
I know of no export format that supports lattices.
If you want a chain deformed by bones, that’s smoother, use more bones (or use smoother weights I guess, but then you’ll have weirdness with stretching.)
Ok. Never mind. Thanks for the tips.
