Hullo everyone! I’m working on making my own Gus the Gingerbread animation so I can master the Blender ropes. I’ve been working off of Bill Kingsland’s tutorials on Youtube (I cannot link directly to them as I am a new user) Everything is going smoothly until part 6. This is where we actually begin animating Gus. My problem is this. When I rotate the head, his face does not move. That is to be expected, so I select the various parts of Gus’ face and parent them to the head bone, as instructed by the video. However, when I select the parent to bone option, the face drops towards the bottom of the screen, where my skeleton initally started before being grown. When I rotate the bone, the face moves as well, clearly having been succesfully parented, however I cannot get the face to actually stay on the head after I parent. Can anyone please help me? I’m going crazy with this problem.
Well, really need the file to look at it… But here’s a couple of things you might try, of course, do this with a copy of the file before you tried parenting the face to the bone.
First, select all the parts of the face and do a ctrl-A -> apply location, then try parenting the face to the bone. If all the objects drop to the bottom but that last one you selected, then you must select each object one at a time and do the ctrl-A.
If that doesn’t do it, select the gus mesh in object mode, shift-s -> cursor to selected. Then select part of the face in object mode, in the tool panel (left side of 3d view) there is an origin button, click on that and select ‘3d cursor’. Now try the parenting again. I have some doubt that this will solve the problem, but it’s worth a try.
Here’s a tip to help you trouble shoot the problem on your own. Every object has a point of origin, it’s a little orange dot visible in object mode. when you parent the face objects to the bones, what happens to that dot when they drop? This is where I am thinking your problem is.
If my first suggestion doesn’t work, (I doubt the 2nd one will) then you will need to post up the file. To post the file, you need a certain # of posts (anti-spam measure). You can up your post count by visiting the art work section (works in progress, finished projects, etc…) and post some thoughtful comments about others art work.
Randy
Thanks for your reply! I tried both those things but unfortunately neither seemed to work. After fiddling some more I think I may have rigged the skeleton wrong, but now I have the file uploaded so someone else can look at it. Thanks very much for your help!
Attachments
Gus round two.blend (1.09 MB)
Forgive me for not knowing the tutorial you did, but could you answer a few questions for me, just cause I’m curious, but not so curious to watch what would be a boring video for me. Why is the armature called ‘metarig’? that’s usually a term applied to the rigify initial rig. Was rigify used to create this rig? To answer this question, just think back, did you have to go into user preferences and enable rigify to create this rig? Was the tutorial you followed using the blender 2.5/6x versions, or the older 2.4x versions? The user interface is totally different between the current version of blender and the 2.4x versions, so was it using the current user interface?
I looked at the file you posted and a fix for the face is a simple matter. For a beginner, it’s a bit of work, but I can walk you thru it. But to be honest, I see so many other things wrong, that I’d suggest you drop this project all together and start over again using a different tutorial.
When I started learning blender I saw the Gus tutorial for 2.4x versions of blender, but I never did it. So I can’t comment on what I see wrong as a fault of the tutorial, or a fault of yours (not following directions, missing parts of the tutorial, etc). Since you were following a video tutorial, you might have missed important ‘key’ parts. Easy to do while watching video tutorials, I even do it some times.
What I would recommend doing is getting blender 2.49 and follow this tutorial:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character_Animation
It’s a very good text tutorial, so you can progress at your own speed. No need to pause or re-wind the video, just switch from browser to blender. It’s well documented, telling you every step you have to take. It creates a character, rigs it, and creates a short animation. It covers alot more information than the Gus tutorial covers and will expose you to animation. Sample files are provided at the end of each section.
Yes, it’s using blender 2.49, which doesn’t have a pretty user interface. Suffer a bit on user interface, and work thru that tutorial, and you’ll get a good foundation to start learning blender. After finishing that, jump into the current version of blender and take on the world!!!
To fix your problem, select the left eye object. Shift-s -> cursor to selected. Now do an alt-P -> clear parent, notice how the eye moved. Shift-S -> selected to cursor, the eye should now be back in place on the face. Now select the armature and enter pose mode. Select the eye object, then shift select the armature’s head bone, the bone should turn blue. Ctrl-P -> set parent to bone.
The eye should now follow the head bone, but the head isn’t following the head bone. It’s lagging behind the bone and looks like it’s shrinking, or scaling in size.
Do the tutorial above, and you’ll learn how to create a simple character that works.
Hope this helps,
Randy
Thank you for your reply! I’ll acquire the 2.49 version of Blender and try these new tutorials.
I really appreciate the help.
Yes, rigify was used to create this rig and I was using Blender 2.6 to make this.