Before explaining my problem, I’ll try to make things clearer by briefly going on about the rig set-up I use and how I bake & export the animation.
<b>Rig:</b>
I have this bone setup with a deformation bone chain, an ik chain (deform unchecked) and a fk chain (deform unchecked). Then there are two deformable bones for weapons on each hand, connected to the deformation chain. And two more non deformable bones to act as temporary parents for the weapon bone.
<b>Bake/Export:</b>
I bake the deformation bones using bake action and delete rest of the helper bones and export out the animations.
Now to my problem:
1. The skin weights look perfect while animating inside blender, but when it is exported (to either ogre or fbx), few verts in the character’s head act strangely. It looks like they are influenced by the weapon bones.
Some things to note:
> I’ve checked the weights on each vertex in the head and they’re all weighted only to the head bone.
> When the deformable weapon bones are animated in the hands there are no issues. The problem is seen only in the animations where I have animated the temporary weapon bone. Note that the temporary bones have been deleted after baking and are not even exported.
> Initially I had left deform checked on both the temporary bones but I made sure no vertex was weighted to it and unchecked it later.
> The mesh was edited (added components and edited UV layout) without removing and reattaching the armature, but the same problem appears in save files even before the mesh modification happened.
What is going on here and how do I fix this?
2. When trying to fix the issue, I thought I’ll detach the skin and try exporting after freshly skinning it. So I removed the armature modifier and deleted all the vertex groups. When I parent it with automatic weights, the vertex groups are all added to the mesh but there’s no influence on any of the vertices by any bone. It’s like parenting with empty groups. Automatic weighting isn’t happening. What am I doing wrong here?
I have no clue what’s causing these and it’s driving me nuts.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.