Hello, all,
I am fairly new to blender, and brand new to the blender forum. I have watched several bouncing ball tutorials and followed the gingerbread man tutorial on the Blender wiki, but none have provided quite the results I was looking for. I wanted to make a game for myself to play around with, and for a first project I simply want a character to walk around. The character I chose was Nintendo’s Kirby.
The problem I am having is that I cannot seem to use a simple “Armature Deform” to achieve the effect I desire. I want to be able to simultaneously “squish” the whole character (so it lies flat on the z axis like a deflated balloon) and to be able to pivot and rotate the limbs separately while the body is only under the influence of the squish effect.
When applying automatic weights to the entire body, I get a sort of torque effect on the spherical body while, for example, rotating and posing an arm. If I move its leg bones, the butt jiggles around under the influence of the automatic weights. I do not want the rotation of the appendages to have influence on the main body, just the appendages.
However, when I place the squish bone in its own armature object, and the arms and feet bones each in their own armatures objects, and then parent the feet and arms armatures to the squish armature, the squish bone armature’s scaling affects the other armatures on all axis. Furthermore, adding a scale constraint for X&Y to the now child leg and arm armatures does not prevent the inherited X&Y scale from having influence in the pose editor.
I’ve been at this for a few hours now, and feel like I’m more trying the same thing and expecting different results than learning something with these tutorials. I’d like to learn how to do it the proper way off you guys on the forum so there’s no more doubt in my mind.
Thanks in advance!