Blender offers advanced parent types such as vertex parenting and bone parenting, which allow objects to be parented to specific bones within an armature for animation. In the Properties, Bones tab, for each selected bone, you can select its parent in the Parent data ID to the upper right corner of its properties. This beginner-friendly, step-by-step tutorial on bone parenting will show you how to parent or unparent bones, and then reparent them in Blender.
Bone parenting allows you to make a certain bone in an armature the parent object of another object. When transforming an armature, the child object will only move if the specific bone is the Child Object of moves. This technique is ideal for simulating flesh and muscle movement by linking skin to underlying bones.
Bone parenting creates a relationship between one object and another, with one object being the child and the other being the parent. Edit mode is used for positioning/creating bones, while pose mode is used for connecting bones. To parent and/or connect bones, you can select the bone and its future parent, press Ctrl – P (or Armature ‣ Parent ‣ Make Parent), and then select the child bone, then the parent bone, hit control p, and either keep offset if they want them separated or connected if they want them atrached.
In Blender 2.67bi, you cannot parent one bone to another by selecting it in the ‘parent’ drop-down menu under ‘bone relations’, because the name of other bones is different. To parent and/or connect bones, first select the object you want to parent, then the armature that the bone belongs to (shift-LMB). Change to Pose mode, and select the desired bone.
📹 Rigging for impatient people – Blender Tutorial
Learn to rig NOW. I show how to set up an armature, how to parent things to bones, weight painting and how to solve common …
📹 Blender 2.8 Everything About Parenting (In 60 Seconds!)
If you ever wandered how to handle good parenting, this is the video for you! In the next 60 seconds, you will know everything you …
Well you did something that almost no one else does which is take one broad topic like rigging and hit all the high points in 10 minutes. The problem that I’ve always had with a complex problem like rigging is that most of the tuts articles will take one tiny aspect of rigging and they’ll spend 4 hours investigating it which is just a waste of my time. I need a broad overview, I need to hit the high points and the most commonly used features and do it fast, and that’s what you did. This just became the best blender tutorial website on the entire YouTube’s.
Absolutely fantastic tips. I love the scale down to .1 then back up, brilliant way to get weights closer, faster. For the IK portion, for anyone using physics in game engines, I do not reccomend unparenting any bones (foot in this case) or else the model will fall apart at that joint. I’m working a game Christmas Cats, and my rat NPC’s legs we’re unparented, and kept flying away from the rat body XD
FYI, joey carlino is one of the unspoken names in Blender tutor spheres. the intro’s have gotten better, the graphics and explanations too. Don’t worry Joey, we do know you’re there. you’re synonymous to a great teacher nobody remembers, just appreciated for what you have done. Joey. you, on your own, have affected the world of Blender and 3D animation, and thus, the world hath changed. you might not be Ducky or Default Cube or Blender Guru, but i assure you, your impact isn’t unnoticed at all.
I learned how to rig in PMXEditor a loooong time ago to make MMD models, and have been wanting to make the transition to Blender for a long time. A lot of my frustration comes down to lengthy over-explanation and failing to include hot keys and shortcuts in other tutorials. But this is super helpful info in a way that my overactive ADHD brain can actually process, and I thank you for that gift. I had made some progress with learning how Blender does mesh and texture, but I hadn’t even gotten far enough through that to try making rigs in Blender yet. This is a very helpful article, and I love that it shows so much stuff while not dragging on. Great stuff. (If you’re like me and need stuff in articles repeated a lot or slowed down/sped up, make sure you use that speed function. Cause I would not learn half of what I learned without it.)
Fucking incredible. You actually explained what auto-normalize does. Do you know how much people like me need an actual explanation as to WHY you need to do or not do things? 10 out of fucking 10 article. You answered like 50 questions I had about weight painting and auto weights and I’ve been weight painting and fixing models for over six months now.
Thank you so much for this article. I was actually gonna give up on character animating for my animation cause it was extremely difficult and no article seemed to address any of the issues I was having. I was just gonna stick to environment modeling but I got recommended this article and thought I would give it all one more shot and it was perfect. Every issue I was having that never gets adressed in any other tutorial got explained here and I feel like I understand the process alot more. Thank you so much.
Thank you! These are literal life hacks. I learned alot since I only wanted the simple basics. I really hate rigging and UV mapping since it’s always tedious and time consuming to set up. Learning to love the process and will be looking forward to the slightly advance stuff if you plan to release drivers and constraints.
I followed the tutorial exactly, but when I parent the armature to the mesh, posing the armature just doesn’t move the mesh at all. What could I be doing wrong??? I’ve tried so many times and followed so many tutorials, but I have literally never been able to make an armature that actually moves a mesh, and I have no idea why it never works. Looking online I find lots of people with the same problem and they’re able to easily fix it, but when I try what they did to fix it nothing happens. I know this article is a few months old but I really need help with this.
hey, I’ve been having an issue with automatic weights. Namely, it doesn’t work whatsoever. I don’t get an error, but when I apply the armature to the model with the weights, it doesn’t apply any weights at all and I have to do it manually. And on top of that, the painting is so absolutely jank that the only way I can get it to apply to some areas is to change the size and pass over the spot fifteen times over. Is it supposed to be like this?
I have a problem the rig doesn’t work at all on the character, which is a mouse at all no matter how many times I watch tutorials and redo it and when I go to do the weight paint even moving the button it always turns red and doesn’t paint the place I want but the opposite side, I’m desperate because I’ve seen hundreds of tutorials and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong
What are you doing at 0:55? You created a new bone with a dotted line seemingly out of nowhere. I tried to copy your button presses but it didn’t work. It looks like a step got cut out of the article. I’ve managed to replicate what you have with a lot of extra steps, but don’t have any way of telling if what I’ve done is the same as what you’ve done. Can you please explain what you were doing?
I really hope your here perusal old comments now and again or at least someone in this comment section can help me. I got control to only act as if I wanted the opposite of what my brush does for weight painting. Control plus left click means it’s either subtracting if my brush is adding and vice versa.
*sigh*…my brain still hurts lmao xD I have my own character’s that I need to rig and right now I made Yakko Warner for fun and thoght I’d use him to learn a bit of weight painting. So I guess I do at least need the “rig” first since I was curious at least what came first, well the rig comes first lol good to know lol.
ive never rigged anything before. I added a bunch of armatures to my guy, but then when I go to pose mode, only one of them is clickable or modifiable. also all the other ones have a dotted line connecting to the main only controllable one. Also my model seems to be disconnected, he is a combo of a polycam scan of a person, and some limbs I had to add in to fix the polycam scan. When I move the 1 armature, the hands I added stay in place as if they are unconnected
Hey man! Do you have any good repository of rigging tutorials or documentation or something, i find that when struggling with an issue in my rig i pretty much need to figure it out on my own, if there only were a file or something of all the methods i can use and try to solve a case, like there is one from Frank Polygon on modelling, if you got a course worth recommending share that too. I’m currently rigging a robot that has a cable with 2 points of contact both needing to rotate and the cable to respond accordingly, im having a lot of trouble with that.
how do you make IK for a single boned leg on a rigid rig? like for example a lego guys legs edit: OH SUCCESS I FIGURED IT OUT! just click on the singular bone making up the whole leg and hit “shift I” and choose “To new Empty object” (something like that) and the empty that you created is now where the leg will try to stand! if it doesn’t work, you could try putting the tip of the bone at the foot and that could fix it! or if “To new Empty object” isn’t there, make sure you aren’t selected on multiple objects in OBJECT MODE, make sure the skeleton is the only object selected. i found this works pretty well with spider-like characters with rigid rigs like a LEGO Skull Spider or Scorpio
Your website would be absolutely perfect IF YOU SPEAK SLOWER AND SHOW A LITTLE BIT SLOWER EVERY STEP YOU SHOW!!! You should take into account those who are slower thinking. People are NOT all the same, did you know that? Other than that, your website is wonderful. You just need to be more considerate for those who are slower to understand.
When parenting meshes to armatures there are basically two methods. Hopefully this comment will help demystify a couple of things. @0:18 describes the first method. To understand this a little better go to the object properties of the mesh you parented and open up the “relations” panel. Here you will see the “parent” is the armature, the “parent type” is bone and the “parent bone” is whatever bone you picked. The second way to parent meshes to an armature is by selecting the object you want to parent, select the armature and then select either “with empty groups” or “with automatic weights”. This method will parent the mesh to the full armature. If you go into the “object data properties” tab and look under “vertex groups” you will see this version has created a vertex group for every bone inside the armature. If you now go into edit mode you can now assign individual vertices of a single mesh to different bones. You will gain more control if you use weight paint mode. This method is used primarily for rigging organic characters (as opposed to mechs or objects). An important thing to note is that if you parent to bones using this method the appearance of the relations panel is slightly different. Here you will see the “parent” is armature and the “parent type” is object. So method 1 gives you parent type “bone”, method 2 gives you parent type “object” and automatically sets up vertex groups for all the bones in the armature. Method 1 is simple and clean. Method 2 is more flexible, but can get very messy.
Congratulations man, you now officially have a notification squad. Or you will when more people like me show up… I just wanna say that I love your articles. Your straight to the point, “not gonna waste 20 minutes of your time beating around the bush and telling you things you already know” approach to tutorial articles is an approach the whole world would benefit from following. Compared to my previous favorite article on rigging (in maya), you’ve laid out all the essential points and taught me a few new things that make the process feel a lot simpler. You taught me vast equivalents of operations from Maya to Blender, how to mirror bone weights, the .2 strength brush method of patching vertex weights, how to not feel perverted for putting bones in my character’s boobs, and several smaller things that weren’t covered in the other article. And now I can re-find information easily with your short article series, since I can pinpoint the >5 minute article that contains the information I need to proceed with my work. It’s a style of article series that more people really should apply to their own workflow and website presentations! I also love your artstyle. The chunky, simplistic, and mechanical look of your models reminds me of flash and unity games I grew up with, like Frantic and BeGone. The motion of your animation goes a step further, feeling reminiscent of Advent Rising, a game on the Xbox that I loved as a child. The way you animate your characters is beautiful, and I can definitely see myself applying a similar animation approach, even to more organic, fantasy styled characters.
Great work on these tuts/reference articles. Thank you for your dedication. PS: This is one of those articles which show how well was blender thought through. (ex. the shortcut consistency… ALT in blender generally removes/disables things (if I’m not mistaken) and along with that they kept it so consistent that even program this huge and open (++free) has default shortcuts analogous and easy to remember, yet not disturbing. Most other software (suites, many times “industry standards”) still can’t manage this (they could add option to roll back changes which they usually do)
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 🤖 Introduction to Parenting in Blender – Introduces the topic and promises to teach everything about parenting in Blender within 60 seconds. 00:14 🛠️ Parenting Objects to Other Objects or Bones – Explains how to parent one object to another using the “Control + P” shortcut. – Details the steps to parent an object to a specific bone in an armature. 00:28 🦴 Parenting Bones to Other Bones – Describes how to parent one bone to another within an armature. – Offers options for connecting the bones directly or keeping them offset. 00:43 🔄 Unparenting in Edit Mode – Explains how to unparent objects or bones by using the “Alt + P” shortcut. 00:56 🎉 Conclusion and Call to Action – Summarizes the article and encourages viewers to like and subscribe for more content. Made with HARPA AI
For some reason, the inside of my character is empty (i get the textures only).the character that im using is downloaded from a website and when i rig and parent the bones to the character, the bone moves but the character doesn’t. Is something wrong with the importing? Im an absolute beginner in Blender 2.81. Any help will be appreciated
I HAVE NEWBIE QUESTION PLEASE EXCUSE THE CAPSLOCK IT IS AN EMERGENCY. SO I PUT AN EMPTY DOWN AND I WANT BOTH MY ARMATURE AND THE MESH TO MOVE WHEN I GRAB THE EMPTY SO I CAN PLACE THE ASSETWHEREVER I WANT WITH JUST AN EMPTY…MY PROBLEM IS I HAVE SPENT 2 DAYS (12-14 HRS EACH) TRYING TO PARENT THE BONES AND THE MESH TO THE EPPTY WITHOUT LOSING THE BONE PARENTING. EVERY TIME I TRY, I END UP WITH BONES STILL FOLLWING THEIR CONSTRAINED PATH BUT THE PARTS HAVE LOST ATTACHEHEMENT TO THE BONE SO THEY DONT MOVE. i KNOW IM DOING SOMETHING WRONG BUT WITH LACK OF BOOKS AND MONEY IM LEFT TO FULL CAPS LOCK EMERGENCY S.OS PLEA FORM THE ALMIGHTY INTERNET. can you help me please. in a beginner blender user, i have about 3 months of 16 hour days every day in blender so thats probably the equivalent of an inteermediate-beginner or 6 monthsof blender. Also man if you have like really good books that deal with learning shdaers and the whole spagghetti code shitshow, please sir please, show me the light, i just need to know there is light somewhere inside the rabbit hole blender is,but right now im in the dark bumping the walls walking blind, specially when it comes to that pasta code 🙂 so i need books, so once again friend, most humbly i ask your help me. Help me help myself get as good as all of you, and in return i will support this community so much you guys will ask me to stop
I need help i have a problem with my bones being staggered, instead of staying where they should be so they slide out so when i move them in pose mode they either stretch far or come in. inside the body when I move them, it used to work properly before. I asked everywhere but didn’t get a answer, the only one I got was someone who confirmed there was a problem with the bone but I could guess.
Just found your tutorials, these are great! Do you have any articles or tips about parenting objects to an armature that need to deform with the main mesh? It’s not something that uses simulation, but rather a separate sculpted mesh. I’m having trouble with clipping through the base, and I can’t find anything on how to fix it (not sure if it’s a weight painting, parenting, or like a mesh combining problem.) Thanks!
i got the object bone parent correct and they move together, however when i export that to Unreal Engine 4 the object that i parented to the bone is not there, it only shows when i do it with automatic weights but i dont want to do it this way as it deforms the object thats why parenting to the bone is better, i dont know how to solve this, any idea?? thanx in advance
I want to parent a piercing on the lower lip of my model (i mean, parent it to a vertex of the lower lip so it can follow the movement of the shape key) but when I do that and join all the materials again (yes, I have to do it with the separate materials because otherwise I can’t do it, I don’t know why) it stops working .. if you could help me do this with my 3d model I would appreciate it, I spent all day searching the internet and I have not found any solution i’m not very good at blender and if you can make a article or a good explication by coment it will help me a lot, thanks
im having difficulty rigging my model, its a simple person with dreads and a hat but i could never figure out how to parent and join all the objects so it becomes rigable. everything works with the body but i just dont know how to make a rig for the head so its objects stay in place! please make a person with with 1-3 objects on its head and a bag on its side.
0:22 Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? In the previous versions, you could’ve simply taken the object, select the armature (that’s already in pose mode) and then Object to Bone! What kind of BS is this?! I thought I was going crazy or activated some obscure shortcut but no, it’s a “feature”! Fuck me!
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! “Shift select the armature, GO TO POSE MODE, then click the bone that you want to parent the object to. Why doesn’t anyone explain that!!! GRRRRR. I was tearing my hair out trying to figure out how they got the bone to highlight. I don’t want to weight paint, I want to parent an object.