but i cant get the armature to deform my mesh - it wouldnt even weightpaint until i named vertex groups for the bones i was working with, can someone please tell me exactly how i am messing this up? it seems so simple on the tutorial but this is a major stumbling block to me trying animation
heres a screenshot and a .blend. i appreciate any help i can get
SoylentGreen is correct, however your issues go FAR deeper than that my friend :eek:
I think the easiest way to explain this would be to walk you through the file you attached, so open it up and here we go…
First of all, the Armature modifier should be first in the stack, so press the little up arrow to move it to the top.
Yes, as SoylentGreen mentioned, rename the OB: field to read “Armature” instead of “armature” (naming conventions seem to be a big issue on this! It’s good to have a regular approach that is both simple to type, and easy to remember… we’ll come back to this in number 4…)
Your Armature modifier is disabled(!). I’m not even gonna ask how. But be sure to click on the “Vert. Groups” button if you want your vertex groups to affect your mesh. They won’t yet, but this should be on. If you also enable envelopes, you can see it works… but that’s using envelopes, not the weight painting you have done so…
On the left of the buttons window under “vertex groups” you can see your vertex group is named “Group”. Blender designates vertex groups to the armature ONLY IF they have the same name as the bone (case sensitive!). In this case you would rename the vertex group “L L arm”…
Now… your bone names… might want to reconsider? The bone you are using is called “L L arm”. I had to look at it twice to realize you had 2 spaces between the first and second L…
Profesionally speaking, this is why it is good practice to pick a naming convention:
a.)without spaces (underscores are okay) and
b.)that you can remember(!) as they ARE indeed case sensitive.
for example: I typically start a name with lower case, and then type the rest with no spaces but capitalizing the first letter of each new word. Then I use an underscore to designate "L"eft, "R"ight or "C"enter (i.e. “legThigh_L” or “fingerPinkyA_L”). It’s also common in the community to use “.L” or “.R” but I found there was a problem with that convention when exporting to some formats… anyways I digress!
I don’t mean to be hard on you, but I feel I need to emphasize how important organization is! It prevents situations like this from happening in the first place!
I have not checked the rest of the file for any other errors. Judging by the quality of the model, I assume you are actually a very adept blender user, and may just be unfamiliar with the rigging process ;). That’s okay. We’re all here to help one another. If you have any further problems, post them to this thread, and leave me a message in my ‘visitor messages’.
Or additionally, the BSoD tutorial (it is quite good overall) skips an important “old” method (it is not really, but some people assign it as such) of assigning the armature to a mesh … that of parenting the mesh to the armature (select the mesh, shift-select the armature,hit Ctrl-P, follow/experiment with the prompts that follow - try the bone heat option), which will leave you with a “virtual” armature modifier that is properly placed in the stack that you can make real if wanted … This will let you skip over such issues a case sensitivity
For the Armature yes, but the bones are case sensitive as well… even though you can “tab” to auto-complete, you still need to start typing with the proper case when setting up IK solvers, and constraints, etc…
But anyways, nitty gritty! Just find a way that works, and stick to it
