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Ok... SO I am but a humble noob in Blender though I am an old, old man. I'm a musician who still writes and records so I've begun to teach myself After Effects and Blender 2.93 in order to make visuals for my songs. I've noticed that there's more chance of getting my stuff heard by a wider audience if there's something to look at.

To that end, I've created a character based vaguely on the 1930's style of animation with which I am quite pleased so far. As I was having some problems getting the eyebrows and eyelashes I wanted I made the eyebrows in a separate mesh which I copied and flipped and then I made the eyelashes using greasepaint that I then converted to a mesh.

Along with the eyeballs, I parented all those to the main body mesh and then started farting around with Rigify to begin the process of learning how to animate.

My problem, though, (one of many) is that even though these other bits (eyebrows etc) are parented to the mesh they don't move once I've got my armature set up nicely and generated the rig. Obviously, there's something basic I haven't done correctly.

Could someone with a bit of patience take some time to explain what I need to do? Speak to me like I'm a four-year-old if you will; I can be a bit slow on the uptake.

Many thanks! Robinson enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Oh thanks Ron! That makes a lot more sense to me! I still don't understand constraints or weight painting yet but I'll do some research. So would I parent the eyelashes, for example, to the bones of the top eyelid? Can you parent something like that to a collection of bones? I guess you'd do the same too for teeth and tongue which I haven't gotten onto yet. $\endgroup$
    – Mark Robinson
    Oct 8, 2021 at 5:04

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Don't parent your eyebrows to the mesh... parent them to the head bones of the armature! I prefer "Child of ..." object constraints.

Even better, you can also add an armature modifier to your eyebrows and weight paint the parts to the armature as well. An armature can drive more than one mesh at a time, and not all meshes need all vertex groups.

The Dork

In the screenshot you can see an example of my workflow. The Dork (P4 Business Man) is in his own collection. All the mesh parts are parented to the armature, and all the mesh parts have an armature modifier pointed to the main armature.

Posette This is Posette, she is sad because her original rigger used shape keys for her expressions, and now there is no bone to parent a lip-ring to. She really wants a lip ring.

Edit Mode To solve that issue, we went into edit mode and selected a single vertex to be the parent of her lip ring. We assigned that vertex to a new "LipRing" vertex group.

Child of Constrain We then put a "Child of ..." object constraint on the LipRing object and carefully lined it up with the vertex group. Now Posette's new lip ring will follow the geometry no matter how big and dorky her smile becomes!

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  • $\begingroup$ @MarkRobinson a Child of... Object Constraint is a simple way to parent an object, they tend to be more visual than the traditional way of setting up a parent-child relationship. If you have eyelid bones you can certainly set your eyelashes to be children of one of those bones. If you have several eyelid bones on each side, armature constraints and weight painting are going to be the best way. Add vertex groups to your eyelashes with the same names as the eyelid bones, and assign the appropriate vertexes of the eyelashes to each group. $\endgroup$
    – Ron Jensen
    Oct 8, 2021 at 5:18
  • $\begingroup$ @MarkRobinson I realized I never mentioned vertex groups as a parent target. They can come in handy sometimes (see expanded answer) $\endgroup$
    – Ron Jensen
    Oct 8, 2021 at 19:48
  • $\begingroup$ What is this LipRing object? $\endgroup$
    – Blunder
    Oct 8, 2021 at 22:35
  • $\begingroup$ @Blunder, the LipRing is just a simple torus. I used it as an example of how to use the 'Child of ...' constraint to parent to a vertex group? $\endgroup$
    – Ron Jensen
    Oct 8, 2021 at 22:38
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    $\begingroup$ Oh, thanks for the hint. Now, I see it on the last screenshot. On a mobile phone you have to zoom in to see it. Now everything makes sense :-) $\endgroup$
    – Blunder
    Oct 8, 2021 at 22:57

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