Hi! I’m working on rigging a wooden artists model as the main character animation, but I have one problem. because it is made of wood, the the parts themselves shouldn’t be able to bend. The arms are fine, but when I move the legs, it also bends the base and some of the leg, which I don’t want. I’ve tried constraints, a bit of bone placement and weight painting but none of them work. Should I look at a human skeleton or more closely at a wooden model to get the limbs and stuff? Is there some constraint or something I can do? If you could help me that could be great. Thanks in advance!
the first attached picture is a close up of my problem, wireframed so you can see the bones. The second is the physical appearance of my problem, and the third is the whole bone structure.
I only have a idea. Can you separate the mesh into different object ( duplicate in object mode and delete all extra of 2 objects in edit mode) parent to armatures and objects separately Then parent the armatures back together. like a machine. Lots of work I know. I think its what you gotta do cause the upper leg mesh will always pull on the lower leg cause they are connected . If I understand the problem.
If the mesh is 1 solid mesh, then you have two choices. 1st you could select all the vertices that make up a part of the body, say the lower arm, and assign it to the vertex group for that bone with 100% weight. Or you could, as kazinger says separate the mesh into separate objects and parent each object to it’s corresponding bone.
A few tips… 1st if the mesh is 1 solid object but was modeled from separate parts, then in edit mode, select 1 vertice and use ctrl-L to select all vertices linked to the one selected. Once a part of the mesh is selected, to separate it out into a new object use the P-key. To parent a mesh object to just one bone of an armature, select the mesh object in object mode, select the armature, enter pose mode, select the bone you want to parent to, and use ctrl-P -> parent object to bone.
