Help adding several ghost bones.

Wilmap

I can add ghost bones in place of the left and right thigh and also the left and right shin, but I am completely confused when I try to add more ghost bones.

I want to add front and back upper skirt handles and front and back lower skirt handles on both sides.

Please can anyone point me in the direction of a good tutorial which explains this in an easy to follow form. it took me a long time to get the hang of just the basic ghost bones, so it has to be easy please.

I have Blondie's and Sickleyeild's Rigging Tutorials, but they don't really explain what I want to do.

Grateful for any help.

SickleYield

You do? That's amazing, because I don't sell a rigging tutorial. :D Creating new bones is easy. Rigging to them is less.

For the upper ones, open the bone tool and select the hip.

Right click and edit-create child bone (IIRC).

You'll have to move the upper and lower points of the bone around to where you want them. You may need to change the order of rotation, too, if yzx doesn't work for what you want (usually, match the order of the thighs and shins on extra skirt bones).

Repeat for the other side.

If you want extra lower skirt handles they should probably be created as children of the upper ones.

Now you have bones, and it's time to do the fun part, i.e., weighting to them...

Richard Haseltine

How old a version of DS are you using? The last couple have allowed non-normalised weight maps (the total of all the weights on a vertex doesn't have to add up to 1) which makes handles a bit easier to set up.

Wilmap

I am using DS4.6 - latest upgrade.

I have added the child bones but I cannot select them when trying to weightmap them!! They do not show up in the Face selections.

SickleYield

wilmap said:

I am using DS4.6 - latest upgrade.

I have added the child bones but I cannot select them when trying to weightmap them!! They do not show up in the Face selections.

You have to create the Face selections yourself in the polygon group editor (when you select it it shows up in the Tool tab). If you right-click and select Mode-rectangle you can quickly select a lot of faces by clicking and dragging across the surface. Just be careful as it will grab what's behind your selection, too; holding alt when you click and drag lets you deselect.

Then you go to the group editor tool tab and right-click and choose "create group from selected faces," and give your new group a name. Rinse, repeat.

Wilmap

OK. Thank you, will give it a go!:-)