Having rigging problems

blacksuit98

Hi, I normally try to learn new things and but I'm just stuck at a brick wall at this point, I'll give you a rundown on where I'm at, I recently purchased a model of a 3D skeleton dog from sketchfab a file.fbx it did not come with rigging which was the main thing I was after so I can move it's limbs around and position it so I decided to try rigging for myself I did some research online and I found a dummy method, where you would take the donor rig from another model and apply it to yours so I took the Daz dog 8 model because they share almost the exact same anatomy as my model, but before doing that I made sure to convert prop to figure then all I had to do was delete the original bone from my model and replace it with the donor and make it the parent but this is where I run into the issue where the donor and the rig moves fine but it doesn't move my model whatsoever, any guidance will be so helpful as to what I am missing.

I'll put in a image showing everything so you can point out what is wrong, thanks.

Gordig

The good thing about rigging a skeleton is that you won't have to worry all that much about weight painting. What you need to do is assign each bone in the mesh to a face group, then assign each face group to its appropriate bone in the rig.

blacksuit98

thank you so much for the input.

interesting I might need some guidance on doing that because the model itself seems to be one solid object I can't seem to choose separate bones or single them out of the model. not referring to the rigg bones

and when I do apply the donor rig I lose the option to even select the model how would I go about separating the model's individual parts because I'm gathering that my problem is my model is static?

Gordig

What is your general level of familiarity with DS? Have you ever used the geometry editor tool before?

blacksuit98

I know of its existence but I've never tried using it or knowing how.

Gordig

Thinking about it again, you don't necessarily need to use the geometry editor. What you need to do is select the weight map tool (alt+shift+W), select all the polygons of a bone on the mesh, select the corresponding rig bone in the scene view, select "general weight" in the tool settings pane, right-click in the viewport and go to Weight Editing -> Fill Selected, and fill with 100%. That part of the mesh is now fully weighted to the bone, so try rotating the bone using the parameters pane and see if it does move. Don't be alarmed that the child bones don't move yet, that's just because they don't have any weight associated with them yet. As I said earlier, the benefit of rigging a skeleton is that you can get away with weighting everything 100%. If the figure had flesh, or if you were rigging something like an article of clothing, it would need to stretch and flex in different ways depending on which bone was moving, so you'd need to balance the weights between multiple bones. The potential downside is that, despite having a rig borrowed from another figure, you might need to fiddle with the exact start and end points of each joint so that bones don't pop out of place when they're moved.