I have a cylinder parented to a bone. I would like to be able to rotate the cylinder on it’s axis, using the bone, without scaling/deforming it. Is this possible? I don’t understand why simply rotating the bone it’s parented to deforms it (ie as the rotation nears 180 degrees, the cylinder scales down to nothing.
thanks.
I can’t re-create that problem. Could you post a blend?
Alternatively, you could always use a copy rotation constraint to the cylinder. But a simple parent should do what you want it to do.
The only time what you describe happens is when you have only a part of the cylinder weighted to the bone along with a subsurf modifier applied to the mesh . If you weight the entire cylinder to the bone or turn off the subsurf you shouldn’t get the scaling .
hmmm… it seems i must have done something peculiar… the whole object was parented etc. to the bone, and i tried a simple test in a different file, doing the same thing, and it worked perfectly, however in my original file it did some funky scaling. I fixed it by using “parent to bone” as well, which seems to work.
ok, i have a related problem. The mesh doesnt seem to deform correctly according to the bones I have and I can’t figure out why.
It’s as if the bones aren’t affecting the mesh 100%, but I checked all my group weights etc. and they’re all at full. I dunno 
I uploaded a blend if anyone would like to take a look. (thanks)
EDIT: ah its ok I figured it out. I had them all in a base bone vertex group, which was unneccessary and affecting all the rest of them.
thanks anway