I’ve just finished successfully rigging up a simple 2D puppet consisting of 8 bones and 8 image planes to match and it took me a month of trial and error to even get here. I understand there’s a learning curve to everything but this strikes me as slightly over the top.
Specifically, can anyone confirm that sometimes objects get parented to the wrong armature bones when solely relying on weight paint? It’s like 60-70 per cent of the time I seem to have to change the vertex group by typing in the correct bone, no matter how carefully I do the selecting. (none of the tutorials I’ve watched even mention vertex groups in the context of rigging with weight paint).
But what, then, accounts for those cases when I simply select my bone, select the object, brush it over and it just works?
And if changing the vertex group alphanumerically fixes it, why can’t I just skip the paint job altogether? That would save a lot of unnecessary hassle.
If this is a known set of issues it would be awesome if someone could let me know. I’m prepared to deal with that stuff going forward but doubting my competence/sanity isn’t motivating me greatly.
I agree that’s it’s confusing. Personally, I gave up on weight-painting and I now do mechanical stuff. Even my characters are done like pose-able action figures. I figured if it was going to take so long to weight paint, I’d rather find a way around it.
However, I’m sure there’s someone somewhere who’s giving this area a lot of thought and trying to come up with a better, faster way to do it.
That’s reassuring! I’ve also looked into other ways to achieve the desired results (constraints, pivot point based grouping/parenting stuff). Maybe it’s worth looking into it more, more so as I don’t plan on going full 3D with my stuff anytime soon.
Why are you using weight paint to parent 2D image objects to bones in the first place, If I might be so bold as to ask? Try the simple approach - parent the objects to the armature (CTRL-P) “With Empty Groups” Then go to Edit mode on each object, select all the vertices, select the required bone in Vertex Groups pane and click assign. This is the way I generally favour for my mechanical models. Don’t forget you can sort the vertex groups by clicking the black arrow like icon and selecting “Sort Vertex Groups” if you want them in alphabetic order. Explore the options here as you can assign vertices to multiple bones with some interesting side effects!
You aren’t crazy, or incompetent. You are simply running into tools that were designed with one purpose in mind, and using them for another. 2D puppets rig like mechanical animations, weight painting is an organic animation tool. Had you been using Blender from the beginning, and been around for the development of those tools, you’d know the hows and whys and wherefores. Since there are only maybe four people in the universe who have had that experience (I am not one of them) everyone else learns these ins and outs the hard way. Welcome to the club!
Seriously, the way out of your dilemma is posting here at BlenderArtists, asking questions and reading posts from people with similar difficulties.
Create a 1 unit radius cube.
Go to Edit Mode, and click Face Selection.
Select the top face only and extrude it upwards 2 units three times (key: e z 2 return and repeat).
Go to Object Mode.
Add a Subsurface Modifier and set the Sub-Divisions to 4 for both View and Render.
Select Wireframe view if you are not there (press z).
Add a single bone armature at the base of the cube in the centre of the lower face.
Go to Edit Mode for the armature
Grab the head of the bone so it’s 2 units above its base.
Extend this bone 2 units in Z twice, so the top bone’s head is level with the top face.
Parent the Armature to the Cube (Select the Cube first then SHIFT- Select the Armature, CTRL-P and select "With Automatic Weights).
Select the armature and go to Pose Mode.
Rotate the bones.
This method is an easier and faster route to weight painting, as the Automatic Weights parenting does a weighted assignment for you that you can always change later in Weight Paint mode. This is how I learn’t to weight paint, i.e. let Blender do it for me and then adjust it myself later.
Don’t forget that with walk cycles, you should name your bones something like: Thigh.L, Thigh.R, Shin.L, Shin.R, etc so that when you copy movements and paste them with SHIFT-CTRL-V Blender will reverse the movement. See this:
Yeah automatic weights. Some of the tuts I watched advised against them to avoid wonky results. But as you were saying they probably work well to get you in the ballpark. But anyway I’m going to delve into the vertex group method more now for my cutout stuff – though the gingerbread man kind of makes me want to give full 3D another try.
Well here are some of the tests I’m doing at the moment – the storyboard for one short animation is pretty much there, it’s a slight little story, more a vehicle to do animation but it has a beginnig, a middle and a punchline … but I’m taking my time now to learn the technique so don’t expect the final thing before next year. (currently aiming for halloween).
