I’m playing around with some modeling and then adding bones and animating it.
I created an animal, used Spheres to make eyes and make a nose… then I selected the eyes, then the animal and did
Ctrl-J to join them… then did the same thing with the nose. I can move the animal around and the eyes and nose move with the animal… no problems…
I added the bones to it, Added an armature modifier to the animal, set up the bones with the inverse kinetics, and all…
selected the animal and then shift selected the bones, and did Ctrl-P and did set parent to ‘Automatic Weights’
when I try to move the head to pose the animal, the eyes and nose do not move with the head of the animal… I’ve done a few small animations a couple years ago and didn’t have a problem with it, but I set up the bones with the body different those other times… Is there something else I need to do to be sure the eyes and nose follow the head when moving it?
If you’re not planning on animating eyes/nose separately, then just make sure that they belong to the head bone vertex group with a weight of 1. You can do this in edit mode by selecting their vertices and ‘assigning’ them to appropriate vertex group, or in weight paint mode: set the armature to Pose mode, select the object, go into weight paint mode, right click the head bone to select it and just paint over the eyes/nose. To paint only on eyes or nose, you can use selection masking.
You’d also need to make sure that only that vertex group affects the vertices of eyes/nose. You can do this by selecting them and then using the vertex groups drop down menu in Object Data: there’s a ‘Remove from All Groups’ operator.
If, however, you want to allow the eyes to rotate/nose to sniff (or whatever it would do), you’d need to add bones to allow for that, and of course assign the vertices to those bones instead of the head.
When you join non connected meshes, blender will often have a difficult time creating automatic weights. The fix is pretty easy. You either assign the vertices directly to the vertex groups, or weight paint.
Assign directly
When you use auto weights, blender creates vertex groups on the mesh whose names correspond to the names of the bones you created. So you should have a bone named ‘head’ and a vertex group named 'head. ’ So select all the vertices on the nose and eyes, it may be simple to select a single vertex on them and hit ctrl-L to sleect connected. With the verts selected, click on the vertex group (object data) and click the ‘assign button’ make sure the weight value is at 1. When you move the bone the eyes and nose should follow.
Weight paint
Select the armature, in pose mode, and select the head bone so that it (and onlyit) is blue/green. Select the charchater object and change to weight piant mode. Paint the areas of the mesh to be be fully affected to pure red.
Oh okay… sorry, typed the kinematics wrong… thanks… for now, not planning on animating eyes and nose separate… am just learning this stuff so doing simple stuff right now… will get into more later… Appreciate your reply. Will go work on it…
have a great day
Barbara
thanks a lot Photox and Stan, I appreciate your reply… am going back to work on it. have been learning how to model different things… trees, flowers, swing set, buildings etc… today trying to do animals… eventually want to create a short video animation …nothing elaborate, to go with my blog stories…children’s stories…
have a great day and thank you so much for your replies. I do appreciate them
Barbara
