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In short, I am extremely confused. I am trying to rig this mesh and every single time I get that error (title). I have quite literally done everything to my knowledge, even remodeling/re-joining the mesh several times; I am extremely, extremely confused.

None of the merging works, none of the other guides I've looked at over this week works; the only thing that I am unsure if it works or not is separating by loose parts, then rigging that. In doing this, blender crashes - which to me does not make sense as Blender normally never goes above 2gb in ram, and still doesn't doing this operation; as well I have tried exporting as a .fbx, importing into another instance, but no. It does not work.

And so I am left with nothing but questions as to why it isn't detecting any bones. Unfortunately I was under the impression that this would've taken a couple seconds or a minute at most to do, but after spending an ungodly amount of time trying to figure this out, I am lost.

When I say I've tried everything, I have tried everything. Less it be something with Blender 3.6 only, than I am at a lost for words.

As a side-note, it is just one mesh that was joined together by other separate meshes - I don't know if this would be the reason; no modifiers, etc.

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  • $\begingroup$ Have you watched this video by CGDive? It should cover most bone heat weighting problems. $\endgroup$
    – yankeedoodle
    Commented Feb 13 at 1:13
  • $\begingroup$ Appreciate the help. I had already watched this video and tried everything except for the paid plugin. I went through it again and now the 'generate rig' button isn't even working: 'Generation has thrown an exception: list index out of range'. (This is such a waste of time. Something that should've taken a couple minutes at most has turned into so many hours of just painstakingly redoing everything over and over and over again. But I digress) I would really love to not set up ik again - and the model, skeleton, etc etc, but whatever happens happens. $\endgroup$
    – Evie
    Commented Feb 13 at 5:59
  • $\begingroup$ I know you said you "have tried everything"... Have you entered "bone heat weighting" in the search field here and looked at some of the many many other answered questions? None of them helped? $\endgroup$
    – Gordon Brinkmann
    Commented Feb 13 at 9:53
  • $\begingroup$ Hello please share your file, use blend-exchange.com (read the instructions) or use another platform is the file is too heavy $\endgroup$
    – moonboots
    Commented Feb 13 at 12:53

1 Answer 1

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You're in the right path with the idea of separating spare parts and rigging them one by one, which will lead you to understand where the Bone Heat Failing problem is lying.

If Separate by Loose parts is causing crashes, you can go to edit mode, select one vertex, press Ctrl L to select all linked geometry and press P > Separate Selection.

Rig the new object, automatically if possible, with Manual weight painting or direct weight assignement in edit mode if a Bone Heat error is thrown.

Repeat for every group of linked geometry, knowing that the problem will probably lie where there is intersecting geometry.

If this doesn't solve, please upload your file.

EDIT:

This character is a whole mess, with double vertices, internal geometry, non-mainfold, all triangles, unuseful hidden surfaces, materials set with emission shaders, ....

It should be completely retopologized and re-textured.

This (paid) Addon will solve the bone heat failing problem:

https://blendermarket.com/products/voxel-heat-diffuse-skinning

but yet there will be a lot of manual work needed.

Free alternative is to use manual weight painting and manual weight assignement.

If you're new to rigging, I suggest you to start with something simpler and with a better topology.

In my example I've done only a little part of the adjustments that are necessary for a minimum handling.

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Unfortunate. The .blend file is a backup I made and from my day-long list of testing to find the problem I have an idea that either the head apparel or the torso and chest mesh is messed up. Even when using different meshes for the character, face apparel, etc, the error still remained the same. Rest assure I have tried all of the suggestions above. My final guess is that multiple meshes are broken (maybe sketchfab has a disclaimer of what can and cannot be rigged, idk) <img src="https://blend-exchange.com/embedImage.png?bid=4mXkVdqg" /> $\endgroup$
    – Evie
    Commented Feb 14 at 5:38
  • $\begingroup$ I updated my answer. $\endgroup$
    – josh sanfelici
    Commented Feb 14 at 8:27
  • $\begingroup$ Darn it. Oh well. The emissions shaders were because I was using a pixel art shader so it could be rendered with an orthographic camera into a sprite sheet. I do have a question (On mobile - I have no clue how to indent or seperate) the issues present - the all-triangles, non-mainfold etc, how would I avoid these same errors? I had abused the decimate function, but as you can probably tell, I'm fairly new to blender. Anyways, thanks so much $\endgroup$
    – Evie
    Commented Feb 14 at 16:04
  • $\begingroup$ If the shader is emissive, you can bear most of the ugly topology, because many shading artifacts will be invisible. In case of standard 3D shading you would have to retopologize the model, using only quad (or nearly). This is my file (you'll have to set emissive shaders instead of Principled BSDF). <img src="https://blend-exchange.com/embedImage.png?bid=dm63yVSR" /> $\endgroup$
    – josh sanfelici
    Commented Feb 14 at 16:44
  • $\begingroup$ Ok cool cool. With that in mind I'd imagine that remeshing 'smooth' is far better than straight up decimating? Especially when dealing with a high- to low mesh? Was playing with varying octree levels and when comparing that to the decimated mesh, one seemed much more symmetrical - which I would assume may not inherently be the end-all-be-all ( for particular asymmetrical things) but a good practice, especially for non-awful rigging? $\endgroup$
    – Evie
    Commented Feb 15 at 1:12

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