I am trying to rig an existing character to an armature that matches my motion capture suit. I am following the procedure from this page:
I have done this successfully a couple of times, but this one is throwing me for a loop.
I have scaled the character up to be the same size and location of the armature in object mode. I never edited the armature at all.
I applied location, rotation, scale to the character mesh. Both the character and the armature have loc = 0, rot = 0 and scale = 1 and they are overlying each other.
When I select the mesh, then armature, then do the parent command (automatic weights) the character mesh suddenly becomes about 100 times bigger and rotated by 90 degrees backwards. This is even though both character and armature had loc = 0, rot = 0 and scale = 1.
Any idea how this strange scaling and rotation are getting into my character after rigging even though all are cleared just before doing the parenting?
Here is a link to the blend file below. Just take a look and do CNTR-P automatic weights and see if you can tell me why the mesh blows up like that . Thanks!
in the scene the object and the armature are already parented together and they are position/rotation 0 and scale 1
but … if you unparent the object from the armature you see that the object as different scaling and rotation
my guess is that you applied rotation and scaling AFTER parenting the object to the armature
while you should apply (normalize) rotation and scaling BEFORE parenting
the technical reason behind this is that when you parent an object it inherits the local space of the parent
so normalizations are to be done first
You already checked for scaling. That’s good. Check to see if character object is clean. Now check to see if Vertex Group is empty, and there is no Armature modifier on it.
Thanks for the tips.
I found that there was already a pre-existing armature inside my character upon importing. That’s why the armature looked like it was in the “right” place, but was actually really huge (It inherited it’s hidden armatures characteristics). So when I parented to the new armature, things git screwy.
I first deleted the existing “hidden” armature, repositioned the character mesh to match new armature, applied rot, loc, scale. Then got a good parenting.
How should I have known that there was a “hidden” armature inside the character mesh when I imported it first off? How can I see that it is already parented to something? I guess it is in that NLA editor window? Or perhaps in the mesh attributes somewhere?
Thanks,
Andrew
The first thing I do when loading a new scene in Blender is to give a look at the outliner, it shows everything both hidden or not.
You may also find the blend info panel useful (addons > system > scene information), I do.
The ultimate tool that shows everything at the microdetail level is the outliner used in datablocks mode.
Same thing here… my character blows up into a giant and falls on his back! And the armature is vastly smaller than he is. How, exactly do I remove the previous skeleton/rigging? What do I need to do, in what order?
