Before I started the arm bones my def bones and the arm were connected. Somehow I managed to delete the connection between the body and the bones and all the weights and vertex groups from the left side are gone. I was far into the lesson with all the arm bones so I'm really not keen on starting over from scratch on that. But appending those from my last file to the one that still had the connection, doesn't bring the bones into the same armature. but into a new armature. Even copy and paste those into tha first armature brings them into a new rig luna.002. If I use parenting with automatic weights all the weights that we previously made are overwritten, so I'm a bit desparate now.
I give up, I'll have to restart.
Hey Sheila,
It sucks when you run into technical issues. It is a good thing to learn from. You can either learn to dig your way out of the hole you dug yourself into.
Or you can learn to how to effectively lie down and start again.
I would say, you're probably not at the start again point (but I haven't seen the hole you find yourself in)
Let's see if we can dig you out.
When you append an armature object, it will become a new object in your scene. If the name already exists it will append .001 to the end (or .002 etc).
Your mesh won't be connected to that new object, the parenting will still be the old on, and the armature modifier will point to the old one too. (You will need to change both of those things to connect it to the armature you just appended).
Also when appending like this - do make sure you grab the object (not the armature data). This will have all the bones and parenting, however the constraints live in pose mode which is not connected to the armature data (you can think of the armature data as edit mode)
You can join 2 different armatures - with Ctrl J
Just like objects. The active object will be the new 'master' object that the other armature will be absorbed into.
In regards to the weight painting.
You can employ that appending method. Append the version where your weights were not wiped out - > remove the bad mesh -> connect the new mesh to the armature (with the armature modifier)
There is a version of the model included in the downloads that has all the weights finished (it's the version from the tutorial so it isn't 100% perfect but close enough)
And don't forget that you can check the finished rig file too. This can be a good thing to dig through and compare to your wip version to see if you made any error (or if I made an error on the pdf)
Also, you can upload your work as a submission for me to look at as well. I have helped many learners get over their technical hurdles and deepen their understanding.
In short - this stuff is hard - but you are not alone.
thanks Wayne, joining the 2 rigs just goes wrong. It's taking me longer to try to fix then to start the lesson over. I made the mistake at the beginning when we copied the bones and you said to remove the parenting which was nog meant to be for the def bones. I guess my brain wasn't there at that moment because I removed the parenting befor copying