Hello, I spent a lot of time on this model of a mantis, and everything rigs fine when I use automatic weights except for its feet for some reason. There’s no segments, the IK controls have “deform” unchecked, rotation, scale location were applied before rigging and cleared any UV maps. I even tried exporting an obj of the mesh and re-importing it, and the exact same deformation occurs. mantis_praying I.blend (8.64 MB)
To be clear, the issue is not with animation, so this is not directly related to weight paint. The parts of the mesh are distorted immediately after rigging.
What is the problem with those feet, as long i can see they have IK with chain length of 9 bones. What are those vertices that are distorted? and you didn’t skin your mesh yet, armature shouldn’t distort your mesh. Please be more clear.
“distorted after rigging” I meant that to say that the distortion occurs after I parent the mesh to the armature with automatic weighst. Everything is weighted perfectly except those areas around its feet.
Some of the neighboring bones are influencing those areas, you have to clean it up either by assigning/clearing those vertices from the appropriate groups in edit mode or using weight paint to clean them up. You’ll also have to clear the internal mesh from some of the pincer bones.
It’s 100% your weight painting. Blender tries to guess weights, but is sometimes fallible. You will need to manually adjust and weight paint after automatic weights in almost all circumstances. Here is a good tutorial to get you going. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbjKJXkDkzQ Take a look at Dan’s explanations because they will help you.
Unfortunately the problem is not as easy as weight painting. There’s nothing particularly strange about the weights at all after rigging in weight paint mode, they’re all localized to the areas they need to be, and it doesn’t appear other bones are affecting those vertices in any way, and adding or taking away weight only makes the distortion worse or as bad.
I do see that for the vertices of the feet in edit mode, they say that the bone at the start of the foot is affecting them, and yet in weight paint mode, there is no weight attributed from that bone at all, nothing but blue in those areas.
Go into edit mode. Display select weights. Select a vertex and look at the weights. You have weights on the last bone at the feet from the first bone. Look at the tutorials to fix this.
You have unapplied location and rotation on the mesh. Select the mesh, CTRL-A, Apply Rotation, CTRL -A Apply Location.
Then reparent with automatic weights. Select the mesh, shift select the armature, CTRL-P, Automatic Weights.
It should work fine. (Or at least as well as the mesh allows.) I would get rid of all of the internal mesh or separate the internal stuff into a separate mesh for rigging/weighting.
As I said, when I go into weight paint mode and click on those bones, they are 100% blue in other areas except for the specific areas they are suppose to be weighted to, so I see no weight on vertices that aren’t suppose to have that respective weight. Whatever you’re describing, you’ll have to be more explicit and polite, I don’t even know what to google because edit mode doesn’t seem directly related to do with weight painting.
Well I did try rigging it with after applying rotation and location already, but it still did nothing to change the results so I didn’t bother doing it again for the file I uploaded. I haven’t seen any problems with the internal polygons either, just the specific regions around its feet.
I tried remaking part of the armature near the distorted areas, then applied automatic weights. The immediately noticeable distortion was completely gone. However, the same vertices that were affected before now have 0 weight on them and don’t move with the bones. Something about the mesh is telling the bones to be weighted differently, it’s not just weight paint, it must be because I made some modifications from the original model near those areas. So, there must be some setting or command that will tell blender to treat those vertices just like all the other vertices, like ctrl+N or something like that. Also even if I weight painted, how would I do it symmetrically? If I did it manually then one leg would bend differently than another leg.
What are the tarsis_hind.X bones for (second row of bone layers)? I think you’ll find they’re causing the distortion on the feet.
If they’re not intended to deform the mesh then don’t flag them as such. Likewise, if the bones they’re constrained to are not intended to deform the mesh don’t flag them either. Right now they’re conflicting.
Edit and weight modes are both relevant by the way, as they relate specifically to vertex groups.
Macser’s got it. The bones on the other layer are causing the issue. Any time a mesh deforms immediately, as soon as you parent it to the rig, it’s almost surely the rig that’s causing the problem. Toggle back and forth between pose and rest position to see what part of the rig is moving between pose and rest position. In this case it was the bone constraints on the other layer that were causing the rig to move when in pose mode.
I really want to think that’s the right answer because it should just be a simple localized rig problem rather than something convoluted, but when I select all the visible layers and press alt+h, there are no new bones appearing whatsoever either in edit mode or pose mode. Then, when I got into the outliner properties list and expanded the armature and each bone, I do not find any “.X” bones as Macser suggested.
He means the bones on bone layer 17. Blender also reports dependency cycles when opening the file
Dependency cycle detected:
BezierCurve depends on armature_mantis through Child Of.
armature_mantis depends on BezierCurve through Spline IK.
Dependency cycle detected:
Empty depends on armature_mantis through Child Of.
BezierCurve depends on Empty through Hook Modifier.
armature_mantis depends on BezierCurve through Spline IK.
Dependency cycle detected:
Empty.001 depends on armature_mantis through Child Of.
BezierCurve depends on Empty.001 through Hook Modifier.
armature_mantis depends on BezierCurve through Spline IK.
I am not too familiar with the coding side of blender, but still, as I said, I selected all visible layers, pressed alt+h and no new bones showed up, both in pose mode and edit mode.
One other thing that doesn’t make sense to me though is: what is that duplicate of the mesh on visible layers 18 and 19? It moves wherever the mesh on the original layer moves and vice-versa, but I don’t remember making it.
Okay, so this would have been helpful to know this explicitly before, but because a couple people mentioned layers, I found that apparently bones have their own separate layers in the armature panel. There was this second layer that for some reason is able to evade alt+h commands, but when I got rid of the bones in the second layer, the mesh had no distortions after rigging.
Bone/Armature layers are a handy way of de-cluttering a rig.
Once you’re happy with weighting and the controls are set up, you can move deformation bones to another layer. More often than not you won’t need direct access to them for animation. So there’s no need for them to be visible.
You didn’t have to get rid of the bones though. It’s enough to simply uncheck “Deform” for the bones in question. Then you can delete all vertex groups and re-associate the mesh with the armature. Not explicitly necessary. But it’s usually best to make a clean start.
I guess I have to throw away a model because blender glitched and no one knows why.
