Hi all I’m rather new to blender, so please bare with me on this.
I have a pair of teeth combined into one single mesh. I’m trying to morph the lower jaw, I’ve added 2 bones to the front of the teeth, but after parenting to the armature it instead moves the entire object instead of just the lower jaw. I’ve probably done something weird, so any tips, or if anyone wants to take a look at the file, would be appreciated!
Edit: I found the issue. The weights weren’t set right. I attached the file as I’m curious as in how you can move both bones at the same time.
Whoops, I thought I posted that link. Here it is. As I was mentioning earlier, it’s probably something painfully obvious on my part. Still trying to wrap my head around bones. To my understanding, I need two both on the upper and lower jaw to pose when morphing?
If your teeth are just 1 mesh object, are they complete teeth? What I mean is, if in edit mode, can you select one vertex from the top teeth and do a ctrl-L -> linked, blender should select all the verts the make up to top teeth.
If when in edit mode the top teeth and bottom teeth are 2 separate complete meshes, then select all the verts for each set and manually assign weight.
Hmmm… I could have swore when I wrote my reply, your post with the file wasn’t here… Strange… maybe because you are new it was awaiting moderator approval, since it has a link in your post… anyway…
I don’t really understand your file, you have 2 single bone armatures in it, but I see the teeth, so there is that much.
So you have upper and lower teeth as 1 mesh object, and want to control them with 2 bones. Select all the verts that make up the top teeth. Look in the object data properties panel (icon looks like an upside down triangle) and look for the vertex groups panel. If there is a vertex group already created for this bone, then look for the bone’s name in the list of vertex groups and select it. If there is not a vertex group for the bone, then create one, (the plus sign on right of list). After the vertex group is selected, hit the ‘assign’ button with the ‘weight’ slider set at 1. That slider is set to 1 by default. This will set the weight to 1, or 100% weighted to that bone. Rinse and repeat as needed…
Alternately, you could separate out the single mesh into 2 mesh objects. Select top teeth, ctrl-P -> by selection, should separate out the top teeth into it’s own mesh object. Once the top and bottom teeth are their own mesh objects, just parent the mesh object to the bone - select the mesh object, shift-select the bone in pose mode, ctrl-P -> to bone. This is my favorite way of rigging mechanical objects, or objects that don’t deform, such as teeth.
Thank you, that first option you gave solved it! One less headache for this creature project.
Got another question though, I’ve been able to apply a shape key when an object is sculpted, but when I pose the bone it doesn’t apply to the shape scene. In fact, for all shape keys, it’s locked in that same position after posing the lower jaw. Do I need a script of some kind, or is there an option I’m just not seeing?
OK, you’ve got a shape key on a sculpted mesh. this I get. (this is bad, read on) But when you pose a bone - it doesn’t apply the shape key? Is that what you mean? Are you looking to control shape keys with bones? If this is what you are looking for, then you’ll need to learn how to use drivers. Drivers can be a bit to learn the first time, but like everything else in blender, once you learn it, it’s easy. If this is what you want then say so, and I’ll describe it…
Now, if you have shape keys on a sculpted mesh, this is a bad thing. This tells me you have a sculpted mesh that you are animating, you should never do this. Normally, in blender, when you sculpt a mesh, you use a multi-res modifier on the mesh to increase the levels of sub division so you can add finer detail. This will give you a mesh that is quite dense, lots of vertices, and the more verts you have, the more work the computer has to do when animating.
Normally, when one sculpts a mesh, when they are done sculpting, they create a new low poly mesh matching the contours of the high poly sculpted mesh. All the fine detail from the high poly mesh is copied to the low poly mesh by baking normal texture maps. Normal texture maps tell the render engine how to basically detail the low poly mesh to look like the high poly one. The lower the vert count, the faster it will playback when animating.
