I am trying to rig this character I made, but several different courses of action are all ending up with their own problems. I have rigged characters a few times before (not many, but it's not completely unknown territory) but doing it the way I remember is not working out.
For context, this is my character and the list of objects. It's a little witch composed of a hat, hair, body, eyes, a pair of earrings, boots (with star accessories on the side) and a dress split in sleeves, top (with decoration star), skirt, and a waist hem.
I have been using Rigify on this character, considering the body is a template I have made before for another character and it worked completely fine.
The options I tried and how they went wrong:
- Joining all parts without removing intersecting geometry. Probably self-explanatory why it went wrong.
- Joining a few parts (with boolean - union), then selecting the resulting objects and rigging. First I joined hair with hat, full dress, and the remaining except the boots, but only the body-attached parts were successful (dress, hair and boots weren't acting as part of an armature). Then I did hair with hat, dress minus sleeves, body including not only head parts but also the limbs accessories, and the same issue happened. Then I put all together except hat and hair, but moving the arms would affect the skirt as well. Putting all together caused several different problems (sometimes only the chin would move as a head, sometimes I got a bone error that I forgot to register, sometimes the skirt would fold weirdly when moving legs).
I didn't try to keep all as separate objects because it didn't work with my other character and my memory is struggling a bit to run Blender, but if it's a possible solution I can try.
Another thing that may be a hint of an issue is that when rigging went through, the Rigify parts meant to be joints wouldn't move, only the red parts.
Edit: I decided to attempt the separate parts approach, it worked better than everything I had done so far - but the hair still acts disjointed and some parts are being set to parents to objects that shouldn't be affected. I'm now trying again to join a few parts into unique objects to see what happens, but it wouldn't solve the hair problem (which I suspect to be a weight issue, considering the geometry is a lot more present there? I never worked much on weight painting for rigging so I'm not sure).