Selecting armatures in weight paint mode

Artwork Animations
#1

Hi

I’m trying to get into animating but I’m struggling slightly with weight paint. I’m just doing a basic human figure to practice.

When I am in weight paint mode it doesn’t always seem to let me select the particular armature when I want to apply the weight paint to the mesh on it. It doesn’t seem to change when I right click the bone. Is there a certain key you have to press or something.

Hope that made sense

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

#2

are you trying to assign more than one armature to a mesh? Each mesh can only have one armature.

#3

Yeah I have an armature for each limb and one for the neck and chest then I was planning to parent them or is that not the best way to do it?

#4

Hi

Try to follow these series of tutorials , they r very helpful

good luck

#5

thank you!

#6

Beg to differ here. I’ve used two armatures on a mesh regularly by way of the Armature Modifier, since they can be stacked. Only one Armature can be a parent to a mesh, but influences on vertices can be shared by more than one Armature object.

Of course there are limitations, since balancing the influences is more complicated, and it probably won’t work properly in the BGE until they get it to see the Armature modifier, but it’s often a good solution to certain deformation problems. For example, I use two armatures in my Othello model/rigging, one for the body, neck and head motions, and one for just the facial stuff. The body-posing armature parents the face rig, which in turn parents a separate rig for just the eye motions, btw. There aren’t a lot of verts shared among the armatures, mainly in the head & neck, but it works OK nonetheless.

To the OP: make sure that the armature you want to paint weights to is that which has most recently been selected in Pose Mode. That should insure you get what you want. But in my experience as long as both armatures have been put into Pose Mode, I’ve been able to select bones from either in order to weight paint. In 2.49b or earlier that is, haven’t yet done this stuff in 2.5

#7

Chipmasque, please explain a bit further.

  1. Is the mesh object parented to any of the armatures or are all the armatures modifiers of the mesh?

  2. If you have a seperate face rig, then why doesn’t moving the head leave face rig controlled verts behind or do noth rigs influence the same verts?

Perhaps I could understand better if you would post a shot of the outliner for this

btw I Loved the Othello

#8

Parenting is optional if the Armature modifier is used, but I sometimes do so, with only one armature parenting the mesh. Whether or not to do so depends on how you have the rig set up for whole-mesh movements.

Parenting an armature to a mesh done in addition to the same Armature as a modifier should to be with the Armature as an Object (so the mesh will move when the armature moves as an object). If you parent to the Armature in such a way as to introduce vertex influence (the “Armature” choice when doing CTRL+P-KEY), the modifier and the parent aspect will combine and amplify all your deformations, which can look funny as hell but usually isn’t desirable.

Yeah, some bones in the armature acting as parent to the face rig also influence the head as a whole, and the parts of the neck that are also under face armature control (mostly the lower jaw region).

Thanks! Actually you can download the Othello rig and an early version of the face/head/shoulders/arms mesh from the link in my sig.

There’s no particular reason for having the Othello face rig a separate armature other than it makes it easier to adapt to other models that may not use the same all-body armature construction. By making it a child of one of the Armature bones (say the skull bone), it can be “spliced” onto an existing rig, with no need to rebuild it.

#9

Hey,

I need to use a python script that assigns Loc and Rot to objects that must represent bones. I’m using Blender to have those bones deform a mesh and I’m having some trouble.

Because the sript only works on objects, I had to select each bone in the armature and make them independent objects (which gives a total of 18). Now I need each one to deform part of a body. Do you think this can be done more or less automatically (like the way bone heat works) and still get some realism?

Sorry for all the noob talk, I can use all the advice you’ve got :stuck_out_tongue: