Carrying something on a rigged-mesh belt.

[arabellajones]

I am trying to figure out how something rigid could be made part of a rigged mesh item, such as a belt, I can think of some fairly obvious uses, and I would be very surprised if nobody has done it. Whether separate or part of the mesh pants, the belt itself is just another piece of rigged mesh, but what of the knife and scabbard. They need some movement, without bending in the middle.

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What I think would do this would be to apply identical weighting to the whole rigid component. Where the weighting is from likely depends on the position of the part, and there are complications in the movements which would be plausible. You wouldn't see much movement with walking, but stand with feet wide apart and the leg obviously pushes the tip of the scabbard outwards.

So maybe it could be done but the useful results are so limited as not to be worth the effort.

I can think of whole items which might take advantage of this, such as a helmet. Using the LOD switching for a rigged mesh makes things a lot simpler, but head-size changes would be the problem. Wouldn't it be essentially rigid hair?

A rigged belt, with the rest attached, might still be the most practical answer.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Personally I just avoid rigging any object that is ment to be rigid.

But if you can't make it sit on a given bone, then rigging it is. And yeah for "hard" parts you typically give all vertices the same weight, but that can get tricky when it is mixed with "soft" parts.

[OptimoMaximo]

I would attach that to an attachment point without rigging, and animate the attachment joint to move and rotate the whole thing along with the body animations

Edited September 20, 2020 by OptimoMaximo

[arabellajones]

One of the things I was thinking of was essentially a belt with an ornate buckle. It would have looked odd if it bent in the middle. It does need a bit of manual editing of weighting to give a uniform single weight. When I just used the automatic weight from Avastar, the buckle distorted.

This picture shows the sort of fastening.

This is the final result I got, a style of belt which is rather commonplace in England.