Head-form change when moving arm, help needed!

[moremetall]

Hi !

I’m having a problem that I hope some can help me with. (I’m using Meastro2.3 and biped default rigg ) I have included 2 pic that shows the problem, when moving the arm the head and helmet will change form.

-What can be done to prevent that, any suggestion …
- How can I make parts rigid, like armour so it will not be deformed during animation?

Looking forward getting some help regarding this, thanks in advance

[colkai]

Off the top of my head (groan! :p) I'd say your arm boanes are affecting the helmet due to weight mapping, or lack thereof.
I'd make a weight map for the helmet and have it locked ot the head via it's own bone. There may be mor eelegant solutions, but I've done that in the past, or had it use the head weightmap, because, facial morphs not withstanding, it doesn't deform with normal bone movement, (or shouldn't ;) ).

[moremetall]

Thanks , that solved the problem after adding some extra bones.:thumbsup:

[SplineGod]

Aside from extra bones or weight maps you can put the helmet inn its own layer and parent it to the head bone.

[colkai]

ooh, yeah, forgot about that.
To expand, what Larry is saying is, unless you specifically tell an object on another layer to use bones from another object/layer, it won't be deformed by them. So locking it to the head bone means it will honour the movement but not get deformed. Which is also easier than faffing about with weight maps. :)

[moremetall]

Thanks for the feedback

I'm trying to figur out how to parent the helmet to the headbone as suggested, I'm quite new at rigging any hints or direction were I can get more info regarding this?

[colkai]

Easy, select the helmet, hit 'm' for motion options, select 'parent' and choose the head bone from teh list. :)

[moremetall]

Thanks !! (was to simple..as usual...:D :thumbsup: ) Do have some problems getting Meastro rigging work with sec layer but I have found a walk around. (moving helmet to layer 2 after rigging in Meastro (layout) in Modeler and sync).

Have a nice weekend !

[ericsmith]

Hey, that's actually an interesting trick. The only downside is that you have to re-do it every time you rig the character.

The other route I usually reccommend is to just seperate the extra item into a new object file. Once in layout, layers are treated exactly the same as seperate objects, so it really doesn't make any difference.

Eric