Hi I am trying to refine a character i created in flexirig by adding additional items of clothing.
My problem is i created a scarf and waistcoat jacket and am trying to get them to deform when i pose my character but cant seem to see where i am going wrong. I have transfered the weights to the scarf from the shirt beneath and tried parenting the mesh to the DEF bones with automatic weights and the scarf jumps to a new location but does sort of deform correctly in a fashion.
I have also tried parenting using automatic weights to the bone and although then it doesnt rotate in the way it should it doesnt move using the weights but sort of rotates around a pivot point. (I hope i am explaining this properly).
I have attached a blend file with just the sarf on it in the correct position with parenting and weights supposedly done but has you see it has jumped. Once i sort out the scarf issue i can re do the waistcoat at a later date.
On another topic i wanted to adjust the length of the trousers on my character and that sort of does weird things too when i go into edit mode and when i go back to object mode it hasnt changed the length of the trousers. I was just wondering if this was just down to the way flexirig works…mmmmmmm
Any help would be really appreciated has im definitely at an impasse and after nearly a year of learning as much about blender as i can, im slowly giving up. My grandson is going to be 18 by the time i get his little educational cartoon i wanted to do for him…sleepless nights are starting to take its toll trying to sort out this problem. LOL
My advice is to not get hung up on the details. Rigging and skinning is a huge job with many pitfalls. It can also be very time consuming.
Your attention should be on creating the animations. For that, you will need a script to work from. Break down your scripts into shots and begin working on one small thing at a time. Spending time trying to fix small poke throughs from clothing or odd bending from a scarf, is time wasted until your body and facial animations are complete and to your satisfaction. The rest can be fixed with shapkeys or other methods at the end.
In addition, don’t get hung up on materials, lighting or rendering. Just use the Open GL preview renders and get your shots to your satisfaction first. It would be a huge waste of time to spend a night rendering images if you need to cut those images and replace them later.
Because you are working alone on this project, you need to be realistic on what you can accomplish with your time and resources. I would suggest using the NLA editor for many of your shots. This way you can reuse animations such as walks, runs, idle, etc. and blend facial and lipsync animations over top of those. This would be a huge time saver for your situation.
Spend your time making poses and animations that you can reuse with the pose library and the action editor.
I can sympathize with your frustrations with blender. It can be a beast at times. In my experience, it’s not better in any other application. They all have their quirks and downfalls. I began getting into 3d with Poser. It’s limitations, especially with rigging and animations is what made me change to blender.