Hey. I’m following the basic BSoD rigging tutorial ( http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation/Lower_body_armature) for a character I put together a few days ago. I’m currently trying to rig the legs, and am having a lot of difficulties. I’ve tried multiple times to do this, but every time I get to the point where the tutorial says to test moving the legs, this happens:
You are having problems with skinning.
A brief overview: skinning is the art of getting all the vertices you want to move, to actually move when you move the bone. There are several methods:
vertex groups: select the verts you want to move, make them into a group (there’s a panel that lets you add and name vertex groups) and give the group the same exact name as the bone, and that bone will move those verts.
envelopes: a way to automatically set up vertex groups based on whether they are in the bone’s envelope. Usually has to be cleaned up, and it looks like that’s the problem you’ve got – some of the verts didn’t get attached to the bone’s vertex group, so it stays behind when the bone moves.
bone heat: a newer variation on envelopes - based on proximity to the bone, rather than a set envelope. Works a lot better, sometimes no cleaning up is needed at all. Depends on bone placement.
weight painting: a visual way to set up vertex groups – the color corresponds to how much influence moving a bone will have on the vertex. Often used to correct or clean up problems like verts staying behind when the bone moves: go into weight paint mode, and paint the verts left behind.
I’m having a similar problem to demonic_pascal in that my vertex groups aren’t working in the way they should.
Having selected my vertices, I try to add them to a group which corresponds to the appropriate bone. Not all the bones appear in the pull-out list, so I type in the name manually. Then when I move onto the next group, they somehow merge into the same group. I’m making sure to deselect vertices from the previous group before moving on to the next (I’ve made that mistake several times before), so can’t understand the overlap.
I notice only 45 vertex groups appear in the list. Is that the limit? I’m still getting to grips with Blender, and this is the first time I’ve tried to rig a character of my own, and I don’t want to sacrifice bones in its tail to be able to rig its fingers if I don’t have to. What is it I’m doing wrong?
99 % of skinning issues are due to multiple bones effecting the mesh. Ther’es a simple way to deal with this in weight paint mode. See this post for more details.