Using multiple armatures for one mesh

[Jon.Topps]

I want to export this object as a single object, with a single animation. I have four blades of grass, and I want each to have a triple bone applied to it, so I can animate it swaying. So far, the bones are acting very strangely. If I weight paint the one, it changes it on the others, it's very confusing. I weight painted one triple bone for one of the blades, and then did another, I went back to the first, and the painting was gone, but the new painting on the new blade was applied to the first leaf... Is it possible to have multiple sets of bones on one armature? I feel like I've done that a few times before in tutorials, but I'm still quite new to all of this.

Basically, I want to have three connected bones, per blade of grass, and each triple bone animates one of the four blades of grass, with all four blades of grass being a single object. This way I can export the FBX as a single object with a single animation to play.

If I take the other triple bones, selecting them all, then selecting the one triple bone last, and try to parent it, it doesn't work right (it's auto parenting the bottom of the one to the top of the other, which makes no sense). How am I suppose to do it?

[still__alive]

If I remember, weight painting works as a percentage. Each bone can control X% of a vertex. So if you try to set bone 1 to control 60% of a particular vert, then you try to set bone 2 to also control 60% of that same vert, then I assume it will change your weighting on bone 1 to 40%.

Not sure exactly what would happen, weight painting is something I'm not really familiar with myself. But I don't think you can have more than 100% weighting for 1 vert across multiple bones.

[Jon.Topps]

Originally posted by still__alive:

If I remember, weight painting works as a percentage. Each bone can control X% of a vertex. So if you try to set bone 1 to control 60% of a particular vert, then you try to set bone 2 to also control 60% of that same vert, then I assume it will change your weighting on bone 1 to 40%.

Not sure exactly what would happen, weight painting is something I'm not really familiar with myself. But I don't think you can have more than 100% weighting for 1 vert across multiple bones.

I'm having trouble even getting the multiple sets to work together on the same mesh though.

[still__alive]

I'm playing with the weight painting system right now. Not watching any tutorials or anything, just using what little I remember from way back when I did check a little of the weight painting out.

First of all, I think I remembered the stuff about percentages wrong, from my testing here. If you only weight a vert to one bone, the strength setting doesn't seem to matter at all. 5% is treated as 100% if only one bone is assigned weight. And it looks like I can have 100% weight for the same verts on two different bones. Just makes the deformations a little weird, obviously.

Something that is tripping me up a bit, and maybe this is happening with you, is the selection of the bone/vertex group you are trying to paint the weights too.

There are a couple of ways of going into weight paint mode. You can simply select the object and enter weight paint mode. If you do this, then you must use the vertex groups list in the object data properties tab to select which group you are painting the weights for. If you end up changing the groups, then it might look like your weight painting disappeared.

The other way that I'm used to using weight paint mode is to select the armature first, then shift select the mesh, then enter weight paint mode. If you do it this way, now you can hold ctrl and then left-click on a bone to select that bone group or vertex group or whatever, to be the active group you are weight painting on.

As long as you're doing it one of those two ways, I'm not sure where you're getting confused. Seems to be working fine and as expected for me. If you enter weight paint mode by just selecting the object and you're not looking at the vertex groups then you're missing a big part of the weight painting process. But I'd expect any weight painting tutorial would mention this?

[still__alive]

Wanna post your .blend and I could take a peek at your armature for you and see if I can see anything wrong there? Keep in mind I've not exactly started learning the animation process myself yet.

Figure I might be familiar enough overall with Blender though to figure it out pretty quickly :P

I am stepping out for a bit though so won't be looking at it right away here, if you do choose to share.