0
$\begingroup$

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.

enter image description here

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:

  1. Joining all parts without removing intersecting geometry. Probably self-explanatory why it went wrong.
  2. 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).

$\endgroup$
6
  • $\begingroup$ The first thing I see in your screenshot is that one side of the character's face is darker than the other side with a harsh seam in the center. This looks a lot like flipped normals which almost always is problematic. $\endgroup$ Mar 6, 2023 at 7:31
  • $\begingroup$ @GordonBrinkmann At first I also considered that, but I double checked the normals, the seam was from some bad mirroring results and the dark side is probably from angle and stuff. I got caught in the rigging issues and ended up forgetting to smooth it after applying mirror. $\endgroup$
    – clarara
    Mar 6, 2023 at 7:37
  • $\begingroup$ The thing is, it doesn't look like different shading due to slightly different angles, it looks like flipped faces. Maybe duplicate faces there? Some correct, some flipped? Now that you're reminded to smooth them, does it change and look better? And what do you mean by saying, "only the red parts" move? Do you talk of weight painting? Because you don't show anything red in your question. If you talk of weights, of course only red parts move, because red means the bones influence them. Did you simply join mesh parts in one object or did you correctly parent mesh parts to bones? $\endgroup$ Mar 6, 2023 at 7:45
  • $\begingroup$ Your new last sentence might be a hint: "I never worked much on weight painting for rigging so I'm no[t] sure". But to deform rigged objects with bones, correct weight painting is essential and you cannot always depend on automatic weights. All in all your problem seems be rooted in weight painting (among other things maybe), but this screenshot doesn't give any information on how the parts are weighted and so the question is unanswerable apart from some wild guesses. Maybe you should upload the file, follow the instructions here to edit it in your question: blend-exchange.com $\endgroup$ Mar 6, 2023 at 7:54
  • $\begingroup$ @GordonBrinkmann I still have to test the smoothing. I'll check the normals again as well. As for the red parts, I mean the Rigify posing limb outlines, I could only move parts like feet and hands. I had been doing Rigify rigs parented with automatic weights, which does seem like a lot of issues considering last time I manually did the work of weight painting and parenting it didn't give me as many problems. I might keep working on this issue later though as I just noticed it's a bit late. Thanks for the help so far! $\endgroup$
    – clarara
    Mar 6, 2023 at 8:04

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .