Digital Art Zone

I’m trying my first rig, I’m stuck at the weight maps, and the DAZ documentation seems silent on this. Do the various bones have to align on one another? In the pic below does the highlighted bone have to end near the beginning of the beak bones? And I assume the point the dotted lines intersect to, near the tail, is going to be the origin? Is it safe to have it in a fairly random position or is it important to place it somewhere in particular?

Omigosh a moving rubber ducky I wannit

*Ahem.*

Yes, that’s the origin.  Generally you want less space between your bones because the further they are from the geometry they affect, the worse bending will be. Do you have face groups set up to use for the weight grouping?  You can try right click-edit-adjust rigging to shape and it will help somewhat.

As SickleYield says, you generally want bones to align when it makes sense. In this case I would line up the tail, body, neck and head bone by scaling the bones to a good size and then use the snap and align commands for the joint editor tool. The other bones - the beak and wings - is fine to leave ‘detached’ from the other bones.
I see in your picture that the selection group for the selected bone is ‘none’. You will have to set up poly groups, again as SickleYield says, and assign as selection maps for the bone to be able to select it and pose it.
Then you weight paint the duck…

Yeah! “Selection Group”, that was why weight maps didn’t want to cooperate, thanks a lot!!!
And also thanks for the rest of the answers!
I’ll do my best for the duck… Be afraid, be very afraid.

ReDave - 20 November 2012 04:33 AM

Yeah! “Selection Group”, that was why weight maps didn’t want to cooperate, thanks a lot!!!
And also thanks for the rest of the answers!
I’ll do my best for the duck… Be afraid, be very afraid.

He’s going on an adorable rampage!

Ducky says hi! There’s quite a bit of crumpling whenever I dial anything above 10. I obviously need to master gradient filling because map painting tends to give uneven results (or at least my painting, does). It was fun though, and finally the rubber duck can do at least something!

Well,he can turn his head, that’s cool.

Smoothing isn’t helping?

Yes even though the maps aren’t great (or even good) it’s great that the duck now moves in several parts!
I hadn’t thought of smoothing, actually, thanks for bringing it up, but the mesh is fairly high poly (surprisingly, around 50k quads), so the facets are small, and I’m not sure if it would help. I’ll try tomorrow.

Edit: and here it is (some postwork):