Parented Rig W/ Automatic Weights Still Won't Move Mesh

Can someone please take a look at my .blend file and tell me what I’m doing wrong? I’ve generated the rig, parented it to the mesh with automatic weights, and yet it still won’t move. Thanks and sorry for this newbie question. rig blend file

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You have parented the rig backwards. Do this. In object mode select the rig then ALT P clear parent. Then deselect all. In object mode select mesh and Shift Select your armature. Now Control P to parent your mesh to the armature. You won’t have a lot of luck with automatic weights due to the make up of your mesh. So I would just use either envelope weights or parent it with vertex groups and start weight painting manually if you know what that is.

You can always check your parenting on objects under relations in your object tab. Your armature have a parent. You need your mesh to have the armature as the parent and the armature not to have a parent.

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Even when parented correctly (check @stilltrying 's response) blender cannot assign the weights automatically, so most or all of your bones have no influence on the mesh. This is why it looks like moving the bones doesn’t change anything.

You’ll have to paint the weights manually instead. To do so, Select Armature → Shift+Select Mesh → Weight Paint Mode. Ctrl+Select any individual bone and paint the weight so that the mesh moves as you need.
Note: you can actively move, scale, rotate the bones you select in Weight Paint Mode to see exactly what the deformation would look like whilst posing.

The mesh has duplicated vertices (around 9600) and over 1000 separate mesh parts that partly intersect. This aborts the operation of the automatic weights with the error Heat Weighting: Failed to find solution for one or more bones. It’s shown in the status bar for a few seconds.


If you don’t enjoy manual weight painting you can do the following

  • fix the parent relationship as stilltrying wrote above
  • to remove the duplicated vertices with Merge By Distance in Edit mode or a Weld modifier
  • turn off the Auto Smooth options in the Object Data Properties > Normals to remove the shading issues that will occur after the merge. (The model has Custom Split Normal Data that is used when Auto Smooth is enabled.). There might be still some shading issues at her back because the strings of her clothes get merged with the body? The normal map could fix it or maybe separate them first?
  • separate the skirt and these “sleeve” cloth from the body
  • do the “duplicate, remesh, transfer weights” method as described in the link above
  • add the skirt with automatic weights. Weights still might be messed up for the ribbon because it’s a separate part. If you can customize the rig consider adding a few bones for the skirt you can control it better. Otherwise, it will follow the body in a bit weird way if she sits down.


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