I have a lovely mermaid model, already rigged. I just need to add a couple additional bones to make certain parts animatable that were like rigid plastic before.
So I used the Joint tool to add two additional bones. I was using the top-down view so they appeared initially down on the XZ plane, but I dragged them up into position, and carefully positioned them where I think they should go.
Then I selected the Skeleton tag on torso mesh, and dragged the two new bones into the joint list. Of course nothing is attached to them yet. So I switched to the Vertex Weight tool, in Add mode, selected one of the new bones in the list, and carefully painted a bit of the mesh that should attach to that bone. But as soon as I release the mouse button:
The painted vertices shoot down towards the floor. Weirdly, they do not respond to movements/rotations of the new bone. Also, Undo does not undo the damage.
What has gone wrong here? How do I add a couple of new bones without losing the excellent rigging already there on the fingers, etc.? I confirmed that if I use the Auto-weight function to rebind the mesh, then the new bones work; but all the other weights are lost (i.e. the auto-weight function produces a poor result compared to the previous weights).
So I used the Joint tool to add two additional bones. I was using the top-down view so they appeared initially down on the XZ plane, but I dragged them up into position, and carefully positioned them where I think they should go.
Then I selected the Skeleton tag on torso mesh, and dragged the two new bones into the joint list. Of course nothing is attached to them yet. So I switched to the Vertex Weight tool, in Add mode, selected one of the new bones in the list, and carefully painted a bit of the mesh that should attach to that bone. But as soon as I release the mouse button:
The painted vertices shoot down towards the floor. Weirdly, they do not respond to movements/rotations of the new bone. Also, Undo does not undo the damage.
What has gone wrong here? How do I add a couple of new bones without losing the excellent rigging already there on the fingers, etc.? I confirmed that if I use the Auto-weight function to rebind the mesh, then the new bones work; but all the other weights are lost (i.e. the auto-weight function produces a poor result compared to the previous weights).