Could you, by any chance point me to a good tutorial on manually creating vertex groups? I’m pretty terrible at it, and I’m not entirely sure how to do it right.
Oh, just start weight-painting, cuz that is what is does, it creates vertex groups and assigns them a custom weight, meaning the less weight they have the less they are affected by the bone (this is useful for joints) And weightpainting is really guess and check kinda thing, you have to see what weights deform the mesh better.
So, should I weight paint, then skin it?
:)Weight painting is Skinning
Rigging is where you put joints in the character and make controls that the animator uses to animate the character. Skinning is where geometry is bound to joints so that the geometry of the character moves when you move the joints.
Alright, I said that wrong. Should I weight paint, then parent the mesh to the armature, or the other way around?
Parent first without creating vertex groups, then go and paint.
Alright. I’m assuming I select ‘Don’t Create Groups’. Thanks!
Alright, so I did that and tested moving around the bones with no painting. There was deformation, of course. Then I painted everything 100%, and moved the bones around and I had the exact same results! No matter how I paint it, they don’t change, and there’s a ton of deformation in the mesh.
Attachments
TarantulaRigArmature.blend (906 KB)
When I use the ‘Create From Bone Heat’ it works. Do you think I really need to weight paint it? You’re obviously more experienced at this than I am.
Well, uh you it doesnt look like you have painted at all, or maybe you did but not at 100% cuz it deforms but when i selected some bones, the mesh was still blue(0% or very close to 0%) in weight paint mode not red(100% or very close to 100%).
I did you a favor again and painted the same leg i rigged, but dont use the file. I didnt clear the near 0% paint.
So what i suggest you do is un-parent it again or better yet go back to the file where you didnt parent it if you have one. Then parent again and first make sure that in the Weight Paint Properties toolbox thing X-Mirror is selected, I also recommend using Add not Mix mode and I also recommend turning on the Wire button (all in the toolbox/floating menu thing)
Also in the rig, move the leg target IK’s(i believe you renamed them to IK1) higher up.
Doing the bone heat thing, works but it doesnt always give you the correct vertex groups, for example some of the head bone might contain fangs and parts of the legs, or some verticies might not be in a group at all. So i think that is cool for testing purposes but to really rig something, one needs to do it manually, and yes it is a very tedious task, but the mirror thing saves you half the work!!
Attachments
TarantulaRigArmature2.blend (912 KB)
Actually, I tried it and parented the eyes and fangs to particular bones, and this is what I came up with. Tell me what you think of it (this is the Bone Heat version).
Attachments
TarantulaRigEyes.blend (930 KB)
That is not bad at all!
So what is next? Are you animating this or is this just for posing purposes?
I was considering making a small animation; just the tarantula chasing someone around my backyard or something like that, but I’ve already rendered out a few poses too. I’ll post those in a little while; I’m waiting for one now.
can someone here explain how you get this brownish color
i eman i check and it’s not the lamp color or mat ramp or UV
so interested in understanding what’s doing this dark brown color ?
now you could apply to your model a UV texture but first you have to add some seams to it then unwrap it and need a good image to map !
Thanks
@ RickyBlender, I don’t quite understand. Could you be a little more clear?
@ DDD, sorry if this rigging process annoyed you at all. From what you said, I thought I had to weight paint the whole spider. Now I know (through some experimenting) that you have to select each individual bone and weight paint the parts of the mesh that you want it to be effected by. Sorry about that misconception, and thank you for the time you put into this.
if you take the first version not the one with weight paint ok
you do a render and look at the color of the spider
it has a brown color
so where is this brown color coming from ?
it’s not a the material color or texture or ramp color or even lamp color
so how can it be brown ?
weight paiting i used to set the vertices with some weight to have more or less influence from each bone
when rigging a model - so very usefull to control how deformed parts of the model are affected by different bone being moved or rotated!
paint image UV
you can paint with a brush your UV or if you have an image you could load up that image
but if you don’t find the unwrap image to fit you model it’s more difficult i guess!
hope you see what i mean here !
Thanks
I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe you accidentally assigned it a UV Texture? I’m not sure; it’s not doing that on my computer. I’ve attached another .blend. This one should work, but tell me if you see another problem.
Attachments
Tarantula.blend (930 KB)
Ricky blender, omg dude you are soooo unclear lol sorry but that is the truth. I guess you dont know English very well? Again sorry, but, yeah…
@SSimpossible, annoyed? not at all! It was a good break for me, since i do mostly modeling at this point, and I was glad to help out, I just hope you didnt just blindly copy my work, but actually learned something.
Cheers!
@ 3DGURU, what issue # was that?
did a test in 2.49 and 2.5
so here is the 2.5 render
it’s sort of browniish
can you show me picture of your render
hum are you using some sort of GLSL here ?
Thanks