Hello!
I've got to the stage of symmetrizing the spring bones, and mirroring, so that I have all 4 struts and springs for the suspension. I've actually applied the mirror modifiers now too....BUT I have this weird mesh deform that I'm not sure how to resolve.
I know that when I symmetrized the rear Left bones I had incorrectly named a bone "_L.22" instead of "_22.L".
I corrected this and redid the symmetry and expected it to work because the vertex groups all seem correct ...but no!
I can't seem to weight paint the spring mesh because they seem linked, so only the Left spring mesh is editable although that one works fine.
Hmmmmm, any ideas?
Many thanks
Ah! Stupidly, I didn't spot that!
Thank you, I'll try to sort that out.
It looks like the wrong name will be the cause.
Blender will never change the name of the bone if you rename a vert group - but it will rename a vert group if you change the name of the bone.
If you change the name of the bone WHILE it corresponds to a matching vertex group, the vertex group on the mesh will also be renamed.
However, if you change the name while it isn't connected (armature modifier) or if you just change the name of the vertex group, it won't match anymore. Blender won't know to keep these names the same.
So if this vert group was created on the mesh, it will still be there. And if you rename it to match the bone name, it should start working again.
I hope some of that rambling made sense. haha.
Thank you so much everybody. I managed to get this fixed and the process of working out how (with your invaluable help) has really helped me learn.
It shows the importance of correct naming - I had 2 small errors in the Left bones which didn't show any errors to the mesh but everything fell apart quickly when that data was replicated.