Rigging Question

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hey guys, so I’ve been working with Blender for about a year now and for the past 6 months been teaching myself character molding and rigging, ect. But I seem to always run into the same problem when I’m rigging, and I have look everywhere on the internet for a solution but can’t seem to find one- so I’m hoping you guys can help.

Here’s a picture of Pat- I have rigged him with the add-on Blender lets you enabled.


please excuse the eyes and no hair- I haven’t touched this file in months so I have no idea what happened to it. Just an example.


As you can see, I rigged it.

pat3.png715×418 35.4 KB

But here is the problem I’m always having. I’m able to move the arms and legs, rotate the fingers ect. But I can never get the head to move right. It’s always the mouth and nose area that won’t move with the rig- causing this to happen. I thought maybe it’s a weight problem, but if it is- i have no idea how to fix it (I’ve looked online, but can’t seem to find anything like this problem). So idk if i’m doing something wrong or I’m skipping a step. If anyone can help me out, I would really be grateful. I have about 5 other characters made, and it’s always the same problem. I would love to get this issue figured out so I can create some short films.

Thank you in advance, and I’m sorry if this issue has been talked about before. (if so can you link me to the forum?) Thanks!

2

I’m surprised you haven’t been able to find any answer to this, as it’s the most common problem in beginning rigging. Your guess was correct: it’s a weight painting problem. Automatic weights will only get you so far. The easiest solution is to go into weight paint mode and select the deforming bone that should control the area that’s being left behind. Then just paint on more weight in that area. Move your rig into extreme unrealistic positions to stretch those points as far as you can so they’re easy to spot.

3

I am not seeing much of neck bone in your rig. Basic neck / head rig is done in such a way neck bone head is pulled up to characters skull base. And head bone is extruded from neck bone and its tip ends at the very top of skull. That way when Automatic weighing is done, the head mesh will get weighed to the head bone.

This is still not perfect however. Because Automatic weighing is going to assign some weigh from the neck bone on to the bottom of head area. You need to fix that with weigh painting.