Parenting Eyes to Armature ?

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hi. Im trying to make the eyes children of the head bone. But when I do this and play my animation, my eyes do not follow the movement of the rest of my armature. I know I probably should have done this before I animated but here I am. I tried making the eyes children of the mesh also, that didnt work either. I still want to be able to set up constraints for the eyes to be able to rotate them too. Can someone please help me. I would like to be able to fix this without messing up the animation I have so far. Thanks.

Holis

#2

There shouldn´t be any problem with the animation. Go to frame 1, or set the armature to the rest position and then select one of the eyes, SHIFT select the head bone while in POSE MODE and hit CTRL+P and select the ´´parent to bone´´ option.
Repeat the same steps with the other eye.

If you want to take my advice, I think you should create two new bones for the eyes, and parent the eyes to those new bones. Then apply the constraints that you want to the bones and not to the eye objects. By doing this, you´ll make the animation process easier, cause you will be able to animate everything from POSE MODE, and not go back and forth from POSE MODE to the eye objects OBJECT MODE, and everything will be together in the ACTION EDITOR and in the NLA EDITOR. It will speed up your workflow.

1 Like
#3

i pretty much give the same advice, except: parent the eyes to the armature and vertex them to the head bone. now go in to pose mode, and select one of the eyes. add a track to constraint and have it follow an eye bone that is placed front and center of the eyes. do this to both, and you can control both eyes with one bone!