Selected Bones and Mesh Only Automatic Weights Rigging Issue

Hello,

I have 3d modeled a deer and am going for a certain artstyle. Attached is a screenshot of an armature I have created, and then the blue mesh is the body of the deer. I have 2 arrows pointing at 2 large bones. These bones are for the deers body, the other is for the deers neck.

I am trying to apply “automatic weights” to the mesh using only those 2 bones in the armature. I followed this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw30m6Inl6Y , which I thought was what I needed, and when trying to just apply the neck bones weights individually to the body mesh, by going to weights>assign automatic from bones in weight paint mode, nothing happens. Any ideas on how to make this work, or any alternatives tips or methods for me to achieve automatically weighting the 2 “body bones” with the body mesh?

are the bones set to “Deform” on? and it doesn’t show any error message after assigning automatic weights?

Yes, deform is checked for the armature in the bones/armature tab. No, there are no error messages, but the weights do not get assigned, and instead I am left with the default dark blue unweighted mesh.

hmmm is hard to tell without a file, can you upload it? also do you enter pose mode in the rig and then click the mesh object in the outliner then weight paint?

Yeah I have done everything in the right order i am fairly certain.

Here is the file:

Untler.blend (1.2 MB)

Here is the zip actually with all the files pertaining to the model, including the blend file.

Untler.zip (402.1 KB)

Well, you have a couple of things going on there…

1st, your face normals are going the wrong way -

Flipping the normals and trying auto weighting worked, but then I get these strange artifacts -


And I’m not sure what’s causing them. I was thinking double verts, but merge by distance didn’t remove any double verts.

Let’s see what @MichaelBenDavid says…

Randy

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@revolt_randy , It looks fine my end yes the faces had to be flipped but automatic weights works?


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Hi, because your character mesh is in parts you can use automatic wights, and delete the vertex groups you don’t need.
You can also simply select the mesh part and the armeture> Ctrl+P>Bone done.
Example body head and neck.
Untler3.blend (1.1 MB)

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@digitvisions indeed it appears the artifacts I’m seeing is the result of my crappy computer and blender 4.2.1 - Testing in blender 4.0 and there are no artifacts there.

Thanks,
Randy

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Yes looks like graphic card issue?

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Graphic card, what graphic card? I don’t have one of those… :rofl: :cry: :sob:

You’re right, it’s probably an issue with my integrated intel graphics…

I need a new computer… now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go off and cry about it for a bit… :sob:

Randy

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Yes this works great! I also was able to tick the “preserve volume” in the modifier and it helps the deformation to look way more natural. Thank you all for your help!

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