I have a rigged insect leg ~I need six; is it possible to duplicate the leg?

Support Animation and Rigging
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I have a rigged insect leg ~I need six; is it possible to duplicate the leg?

  • The leg is influenced by three separate armatures. I’m hoping there is a practical way to duplicate the whole leg and the leg parts of all three armatures as a unit; to then add five more legs to the body.
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Has your mouse got a scroll wheel ?
If you scroll down the forum you will see a series of support forums. Please use them for support questions !!! Not difficult to comprehend

Moved from ‘General Forums / Blender and CG Discussions’ to ‘Support / Animation and Rigging’

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[QUOTE=Gizmojunk;2974013

  • The leg is influenced by three separate armatures.[/QUOTE]

Um, what? Why? Or are you just confused? Do you mean you have three bones in your armature? An armature is a single object and it can have as many bones in it as you wish. There are some advanced rigging reasons for using two armatures, but a simple leg rig is not usually one of them.

If you mean that you have three bones, select them in edit mode, Shift D to duplicate, move them to your next leg position. Rename them using the .L and .R conventions for right and left side bones. Also, any constraints and parenting that are on the duplicated bones will carry over to the duplicates. This sometimes means you will have to manually reconfigure those constraints.

Please supply a .blend or at least a few screen shots of your problem. It will help us help you.

Good luck!

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Thank you for the kind words Richard Marklew; no, I have a trackball; and thanks for moving the thread to get relevant exposure.

Thanks :cool:
In this case, it is actually three armatures. It’s a model that I abandoned years ago, and have days ago resumed work on. It’s a rigged leg that has an IK skeleton, and FK skelleton, and a Deformer skeleton intended for export with the model; the other two influence the Deformer rig depending on the keyframes.

I had been looking for a way to copy the leg two more times, and then add a mirrored copy (of all three) for the other [left] side; they have the .R naming convention. It looks like I’ll have to do as I had hoped to avoid… namely manually copying each of the three and hand renaming each bone, and reassigning each weight group on each leg to each renamed bone.

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[QUOTE=GizmojIn this case, it is actually three armatures. It’s a model that I abandoned years ago, and have days ago resumed work on. It’s a rigged leg that has an IK skeleton, and FK skelleton, and a Deformer skeleton intended for export with the model; the other two influence the Deformer rig depending on the keyframes.[/QUOTE]

If it’s three separate armature objects, then it would be best to combine them into one armature object and separate out the bones to bone layers. Fk bone layer, IK Bone layer, etc…

Copying a leg bone chain is pretty much a simple task, copy it, paste it and correct bones as needed. IK pole targets and IK constraints may need fixing.

Rinse & repeat for the third leg.

I had been looking for a way to copy the leg two more times, and then add a mirrored copy (of all three) for the other [left] side; they have the .R naming convention. It looks like I’ll have to do as I had hoped to avoid… namely manually copying each of the three and hand renaming each bone, and reassigning each weight group on each leg to each renamed bone.

Once you have one side working, all the rigging is done, it’s very simple to copy the bones over to the other side. It’s a couple of simple steps to do that, but first you have to get one side working 100%…

Randy

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That’s what I started exploring last night (not long after I posted this thread). I had not used bone layers before, and it is encouraging to learn that this actually has the potential to work. Thank you.

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I had been looking for a way to copy the leg two more times, and then add a mirrored copy (of all three) for the other [left] side; they have the .R naming convention. It looks like I’ll have to do as I had hoped to avoid… namely manually copying each of the three and hand renaming each bone, and reassigning each weight group on each leg to each renamed bone.

remember that if you use the .R or _L or .Left or .Right convention … then it’s a simple thing to just build and set up one side of your Rigg then…
select them all > copy them > scale them along using -1 on the X axis (usally) (I like to set pivot center to 3D cursor when I do this > then goto the bottom tool bar > find Armature > then on the pull up menu find > flip names…

now all your Special_bone.R.001 bones are now Special_bone.L bones…

or that is to say all your copied and bones from the Right side that are now on the Left side are now properly named with a .L instead of a .R