How to make multiple objects move with skeleton

#1

So… I am very VERY new to modelling and rigging, but to start myself out, I decided to model a simple goofy cartoon dragon character and set it up for animation:

I’ve got my eyes set up with controls and I’ve just begun setting up the skeleton. My question is: how do I get the spikes on his neck, the eyes and the teeth (they are separate objects) to move along with the skeleton like the main mesh?

I tried parenting the objects to different joints in the skeleton, but I can imagine that it might not work well when the neck is moving dynamically. Doing this also makes things a bit unorganized in my Outliner which I love to keep clean and organized.

Is there a better way to make these features follow the distortion of the base mesh as the joints rotate?

#2

I would personally rig the seperate elements and have them as part of the skeleton hierarchy. For instance set up a joint at the base of the neck spike and have that parented to the neck joint which will affect it. Then take the spike joint you made and parent contrain it to a grp of the spike. (rigging hint: constraints will blue out your attribute values and prevent you from being able to key them, so you select the object and hit ctrl+ G to grp it then you can constrain the grp adn the object under it will still be available for animation keys.)

#3

Thank you for the sound advice! Will the method you proposed make the spikes move more convincingly than the way I have it set up now, or is it just a matter of personal preference?

#4

Hi,
It depends on the level of detail you want to achieve.

lowest: create a cylinder that big enough to cover both the neck and spikes, paint weight on that cylinder, then copy skin weight to your actual mesh. It’ll looks fine but the spike will kind of ‘stretch’ with the neck.

mid: assign the same weight values as the nearby vert on the neck on all the verticies on that object (a spike).
TDMatt’s covered this method on his blog.
http://td-matt.blogspot.com/2011/05/automatic-hairfur-plane-skin-weighting.html

high: I’d go with rivet joints. Expensive but nice.

#5

Wow thank you very much! I honestly had no idea you could paint weights to more than one mesh. I think rivet nodes are a bit above my budget currently. Thank you!

#6

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