I am not sure anyone can help me with part of this problem but I thought I should put it in the forum just in case someone can help. This forum has been a lifesaver in the past for me in so many ways.
I have a dog mesh. It is rigged, using Rigify. It works fairly well, but the other day when I tried to set up an action, in this case, having the dog simply sit down, the stomach area of the mesh distorts badly. I attached the mesh to the Rig using “Automatic Weights.”
Here is where I am starting to have it sit. You can see the stomach area (1) begin to contract as if the dog is trying to suck in the stomach, and areas (2) and (3) where the mesh is just starting to distort;
I spent two days re-painting the weights with the basic painting tools and also setting individual vertices in the Weight Paint panel using numerical inputs.
I have another question regarding this situation but will put it in another post as it doesn’t relate directly to this.
I would remove area 1 from leg bones vertex groups and use a shape key with a driver so it deforms as needed with upper legs bones rotation. Rotating this area around a leg bone tail is useless.
In fact the shape key is not essential for your original issue, you just have to erase the weights from the problem area. I just think one shape key or more with a driver is better than painting partial weights. Driver is an easy concept but very powerful, it is just an expression or code that animates the shape key value or any animation value (except maybe material attributes). If i find the time i will post an example tomorrow.
Thanks kyrgr. You don’t have to go to such an extent. Maybe you could point me to some good tutorial(s) that will teach me the basics of shape keys and drivers.
I hate to say this, but you don’t have the correct topology for an animated character. It will no doubt look good rendered as a statue, but it’s not going to animate well.
The yellow line shows how the edge flow from the back leg should go, up and around and back down the back of the leg. The green line shows how the body edge flow should go, up around the front of the leg, over top and back down at the back. Between these 2 lines you should have several edge loops along the lines between the 2. This will give you lots of verts to spread the deformation across.
Since i am just an amateur (2d animation mostly) i cannot judge which tutorial is on point (and do not know the first thing about proper rigging) but i made an example of shape key anyway. The var in the driver is the “bbody” bone local rotation around z and of course the outcome of the expression is the shape key value. You can see the stomach do its thing between 1-20. I suppose you can add more variables or Python commands but only one driver per shape key. Here’s the link, i hope it helps.
That was “above and beyond the call” kyrgr. I am humbled by your investing the time you took to make this example for me. I will study it and also learn how to make shape keys. It looks like this process will solve my problem.
