Hi, I would like to ask if anyone could tell me how to rig a character with accessories (e.g armour plates etc.) I’ve tried using constraints such that the various components follow the body’s deformation but I think I’m doing it wrong as I can’t get the desired result. Is there a way to do rig it such that the armour moves along with the character when it is being posed (the hand armour moves along with the hand etc.)?
May i join myself and share your questioning?
Fact is, i try to wear my caracter with a sort of dress (simple cloth - indeed) and tried with weight painting to the bone… Doesn’t seem to work neather…
does anyone have any answers to this?
Haven’t tried it myself but here are a few thoughts.
depends, do you want to set up it so that the accessories are animatable, or make it so the their motion is actually simulated.
If the former, you can just use additional bones in the armature and animate them by hand.
For the second, which I think is what you want, it is more complicated.
For stuff like armor plates one possibility that MIGHT work is:
for each armor plate put a proxy strand (two verts and an edge) or plane. Use softbodies and set the rigidity as high as it will go.
Vertex parent an empty to the end of the strand. Now have the armor piece track the empty. This may give okay results. The difficulty will be controlling the motion of the strands. Don’t use the character mesh for collisions, rather use proxy boxes and objects to constrain the motion of the strands.
EDIT:
actually, reading your post again, I’m not sure this is exactly what you mean. If you are just trying to get the armor to stay with the mesh, additional bones and careful parenting should be sufficient. depends on what effect you are trying to achieve. maybe you could describe your situation further?
You could try parenting the object (armour) to points on the animated body. Not sure if this is the best way to do it, but it’s worth a try.
To do this, go to the edit mode of the controlling object (the body), go to vertex select mode, and select either one (for matching position only) or three (to match both position and rotation: this is probably what you want) vertices. (Use the SHIFT key to select multiple vertices.)
With the verticies selected, hold the CTRL key, and select the object you want to add. You should now have the three verticies AND the object selected.
Hit CTRL-P to parent the object to the vertices.
That said, depending on what you need to do with it, it might just be easier to parent the objects to your armature instead.
thanks, I wanted to do it without having to join the meshes, and your method seems to do the job. thanks again