problem with parenting with automatic weights

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi,

I’ve been working on a sculpt of a dragon, and have just finished sculpting and texturing my model.
I made my model in a static position and want to rig it so that I can move it around.
The model is simply to create a single image so all I want is actually to link the rig to my model, but when I select the model --> select the rig --> choose armature deform with automatic weights, deforming the rig in pose mode won’t influence the mesh.

I’m quite new to rigging so I probably just made a stupid mistake, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9hSF8uWR0I9N1Y0YndJQjUwaTQ

2

This is why:


You have 425,000+ Tris (three sided faces) in your model and no quads (four sided faces) Blender prefers Quads, so there is no chance of me finding out which one could be causing the issues. I tired with just an extract of you model, the head, and got the same result. So there are no weights assigned to any bones, therefore no movement of the mesh when you pose the bones. I am not sure where you go from here, it is going to take a very long time to work out where the problems lies.

I checked for unapplied rotations or scales - not the problem, I checked for duplicates, took 56 out of the head, but that still didn’t get a weight assignment. I don’t know where to go next with this.

I tried with an even smaller bit of the head and got a weight assignment, but that was just a bit of trial and error!

Cheers, Clock.

3

… and I also tried weight painting the head after I did an empty groups parent, that worked, but that is going to be a very long job for you. I will look at you armature for possible errors and report back.

Cheers, Clock.

4

You need to re-topologize your sculpt before you try to rig it. Here’s a link to get you going, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maDuLzl6MXU. A better alternative would be to check out Blender Cookie or Olivar Villar tutorials.

5

Here’s one problem area:


This tri overlaps these two underneath it:


… and this one:


These are on one of the horns, there are many more instances like this of coincident/overlapping faces. You will never get an automatic bone parent with these types of topological errors. I am not sure what I can say other than you have a great deal of work on your hands to sort this out.

Cheers, Clock.

6

Hi thanks for the quick replies.
Strangely enough the error message didn’t appear when I tried parenting.
Anyway, I agree that weight painting will take for ages, but so will re-topologizing I’m afraid
And since I’ve been working for quite some time on this project, I think I’ll keep the model in it’s current position, and only weight paint some simple parts of the model so I can move these to make the model less symmetrical.

Thanks again for the help :).

7

Hi. One way would be to use Mesh deform modifier.

  1. Make a simple cage mesh around your character.
  2. Parent the mesh cage to the rig, and create the weights.
  3. Character selected, add Mesh deform modifier and select the cage and bind.
  4. If character is multiobject, then just repeat step 3 in all of them.
8

If you are rigging a sculpt mesh, use envelope when you parent the rig. You will have to tweek some bone settings but it is the quickest way to get results that are useable under those situations.

9

Thanks for all the suggestions.
Your solution worked perfectly for me Vilvei, this is just what I was looking for.
Took me about an hour to get the the whole mesh rigged.:slight_smile: