Recently I have been experiencing a specific bug while trying to import my rigged models.
Screenshot of error message
Screenshot of current rig
If anyone has any idea on how to fix this, any help is appreciated, And if you need me to supply more screenshots. I am totally willing to do so.
Is that the same rig from the Tower Unite sdk? (https://www.towerunite.com/sdk/creating-characters)
Because it looks like it’s either different or you’ve modified it, you can’t move or adjust the bones in any way in Blender because when you import it, it will snap back to its original position/scale in-game and things will become messed up.
When you import the rig, you have to match the model to the bones, not the bones to the model, it can make rigging certain models awkward but that’s how it has to be done.
As for the error itself, it’s not detecting any bones so I’d say they’re either named wrongly or the mesh hasn’t been made a child of the armature or weight painted properly. Either way if you got it to import it won’t look pretty.
What you want to do is open the armature .blend file again where everything is set up for you, import your model into that, then never touch the bones position/scale/rotation etc.
You will have to re position your model to fit the bones as best as you can then continue with the weight painting again.
When you get to that stage, to attach the mesh to the armature you have to drag the object into the armature in object mode(or select the mesh then the armature then hit CTRL + P) you’ll get a popup asking for how you want it to be attached. Either by Empty weight or automatic weight painting.
Use Empty if you want to weight paint each bone yourself, or use automatic if your mesh is very close and accurately surrounding the bones, even then you’ll almost certainly need to fix up some of the weights.
I found a nice video tutorial which explains things nicely if you’re struggling with weight painting;
so if I was to rig a character model like funky Kong how would I go about stretching him to fit the rig. Because you are correct by saying that I stretched the actual bones inside of the tower unite SDK rig. I have tried to mold the player model to the rig but I cannot seem to figure it out. And most of the tutorials I have seen have used The pose points inside of the player model in order to stretch them. But the player model I have does not seem to have any poseable points.
It’s the biggest challenge with models that don’t fit the skeleton perfectly, you might have to stretch him around a bit so he gets as close to the skeleton as possible. Even if the bones aren’t perfectly centred it will be fine, like the leg bones might be closer to the inner leg than the outer leg, as long as you weight paint the legs well enough it shouldn’t break too badly with animations.
For positioning/scaling him easier use proportional editing mode, there’s a bunch of tutorials on Youtube and it’s a super important mode for editing the mesh. It lets you pull and stretch groups of vertices smoothly, you’ll be able to bend arms and things without bones/pose points. In Josh’s tutorial video he used it here: https://youtu.be/aYnYWDALONI?t=1241
You’ll also likely have to forget about rigging fingers and just paint them to the wrist bone unless you’re willing to scale them down quite a bit. It’s generally fine because fingers are a pain to get right even when they fit, and we’ve all done it.
It’s going to be tough to get him looking right if it’s your first model, I’d recommend doing a few more fitting models first that are more human proportioned to practise then come back to him when you’re more experienced, you’re going to learn a lot more after rigging a few simpler models.
