Blender: Transfer Bones BETWEEN Armatures (In 60 Seconds!!)

[@TheRoyalSkies]

In case you need the written sequence: Copy rig with bones you want > Paste it to Blender file you need them > Click rig with bones you need > tab to edit mode > select all the bones you want > 'p' to separate them > delete everything left over > click the separated bones > shift click final armature > ctrl + j to merge them > in the armature modifier make sure the new rig is selected - Hope that helps :)

[@stealth2951]

Royal you are a blessing to the people trying to learn this stuff. Honestly, you are right to the point with no fluff. And answer to help peoples questions and problems. I've used your videos a couple of years ago for a character. Usually I do more scenery stuff. But now, I want to get into making characters . So I personally ty for your videos. I will be watching a lot more. I do have one question though. I tried dl'ing the spring bones addon. I guess it's not supported for blender 3.0 and up. I guess I gotta use wiggle then. Or is there a way to get it to work.

[@headrushgaming2614]

i need you. please! i used all of your videos to set myself up an awesome iK rig, but now everything is animated , when i try to import it into unity, i can't create a humanoid avatar. do you know how to resolve this issue?

[@captaincomedian6320]

This is all good and well, but it doesn't seem to apply to one particular file I'm working on. In it I have: A) A character mesh B) A metarig for A to ultimately skin to C) A separate armature with extra bones to add to the rig So far my character has antennae bones in "C". How do I parent them to the head bone in "B"?

[@RexVergstrong]

When I go to join the armature and the mesh it tells me "no mesh data to join". What could be the problem?

[@RexVergstrong]

Just found how to solve it. Just Merge by distance.

[@folknerdragon4113]

THANK YOU!!!! I've known how to do those for a good while now but hated the fact that it took me a shit ton of trial and error just to figure it out

[@dragonfly3860]

I have watched this no less than 50 times because it always helps.

[@AndrzejGieraltCreative]

Hoping to get some help with this.... whenever I join my armature, the 2nd armature's animation is gone, and they get all bent as if affected by the parent somehow.... how do I avoid this?

[@blubase06]

oh my god thank you. countless hours of searching

[@communityspiritualc704]

Thank you Royal Skies!!! SUBBED!!! Searched high and low sitting through countless tutorials regarding AutoRig and bam! In 60seconds!!!

[@aaronainairetv]

You forgot the important step of parenting the bones to the head bone. Leaving the hair bones like that after joining is gonna leave them hanging when you move the head unless you re-parent the bones.

[@mickg8340]

Goto edit mode, Click on all the bones you just joined to the armature, Ctrl+Click on the head bone and press Ctrl+P and select "Keep Offset". Bam, your done!😎

[@XDM_Studios]

I know that sometimes if you try to join two armatures together that they both have a lot of Bones you may crash blender. I'm trying to do the very same instance as this video here I'm trying to add a new hair that I've worked on to one of my older models as an update and the armature on the hair has quite a few bones and when I merge them together and blender just freezes. In my case if you're ripping it from an existing model make sure to clear the parents while keeping transforms in order to keep it from crashing.

[@ageofgar]

What sorcery is this 👹. Thank you so much for sharing this !

[@delta-117]

What’s the best way to reduce vertices on a rig? I’m not sure if you’ve covered this or not already.

[@3DWithLairdWT]

Another great video! Love your stuff, and your game

[@123newjersey3]

This is exactly why I subbed to your Patreon ❤ 😍 Tysm for these speedy tutorials in my time of need lmao

[@minkx346]

When I click ctr j the half of my mesh I'm tryna merge automatically goes to the ground. The armatures merged great. But now the mesh is on the ground and not moving with the armature..

[@mladennikolic996]

When I try to do this my bones disappear. I can see them in the armature joined in the hierarchy but not in the scene. Applied all transforms and renamed the bones. Any help?

[@IvanPlotnikov-ni5rb]

MAY THE GODS BLESS YOU! SPASIBO, BUDDY

[@jhonysteak5512]

Doesn't work for me, I've been scouring youtube for a while to transfer the armature from one model to another, do you know a more detailed tutorial on the matter? It's not the tutorial that doesn't work it's just that it's going way too fast and I don't understand much about what he's doing or what he's saying so if there's one that isn't Speeding it up would be nice. Even slowed down frame by frame I can't display the transfer box which appears at 0.42.

[@jonkku]

Missing mentioning the last step is to re-parent the new bones to where they should be, in this case the head.

[@soundkaiser]

“Hope that helps” IT ALWAYS HELPS! THANKS ROYAL!! 🥹

[@ronioclarenzo6137]

Yoou be the coolest greatest tutorial creator in the whole wide world! What would blender be without you? :-)

[@click4dylan2]

Fake comment is fake

[@GreenSoup2HoT]

i have some hair that has been weight painted bad. like some hair strands are connected to my shoulder and i have tons of tiny root bones inside my head i dont know what to do with. how do i delete all of my hair bones and stop them from having any influence on all the meshes. that way i can start over weightpainting my hair and add new bones and follow your amazing tutorials

[@ghizbot2811]

I guess you could select some of the bones in edit mode, press p to separate then delete them. Select all your hair strands and one bone left for the hair and hide every part of the mesh but the hair and the bones and go paint with a weight of 1 and "auto normalize" on. After all the hair strands are attached to one single bone I guess you'll be able to make a more subtle work later on

[@azure8247]

What about transferring animations from one skeleton to another that has a different number of bones or even bone positions? I often see memes with low poly characters dancing or using the animations from a game with obviously more advanced rigs and i always wondered what's the process to port animations to less detailed or just different rigs.

[@GhostRider-un9gm]

Hello did you found out how? Trying to do the same. Any videos? 😅

[@juliusdx]

Found your video while trying to figure out how to append hair to another model, using the Blender Append function somehow doesn't retain the secondary bones that was originally in the new hair, anyone got ideas how to retain the secondary bones (aka spring bones in .VRM).

[@JetstreamSam-ds7yv]

how to combine skel sir? mine with other skel project, im googling n youtubing but no clue

[@RDD87z]

HI! . do you know if there s a way to transfer 1 bone data (loc and rot) from the arm of a rig, ot another arm from another rig? is it as simple as copy data and paste data to the bone? (if the bones are oriented the same)? i ask because probably i need to do the same for legs and maybe theres a faster way. Your videos help a lot. thank you.

[@TheSEWEGI]

I'm trying to make a 4 armed character by copying the original arms and reposition them. And when i merge two armatures (ctrl+j) new arms (mesh) go to their original place but the bones stay where they should. What am I doing wrong?

[@ghizbot2811]

If your bones have the same names maybe there could be an issue? Make sure that you repainted it as well I guess? It feels like the influence of the first set of bone is controlling both arms

[@TheSEWEGI]

@@ghizbot2811 yeah, I didn't know that I was supposed to rename the bones. That was the issue. Thanks

[@Shka_maru]

First off, I was finally able to attain some level of competency in rigging to your videos so i just want to say...THANK YOU! I do have a quick question, sometimes when I'm building a rig from scratch and apply IK to the legs, when i move the pelvis up or down (for a squatting/sitting pose or something), the whole rig goes up or down through the floor instead of the rig bending at the knees and feet still in position. Any ideas why? Is this a common issue that's easily avoidable?

[@warlord76i]

Can somebody tell me why bone axis up is y and not z? And how do i change it to match global Z?

[@HelperUnknownGB]

I’ve always wondered how you actually model game-ready hair, I’m aiming for something like Marin Kitagawa from My Dress-Up Darling. I also wanna try and do Ochaka Uraraka from My Hero Academia.

[@Ggthb]

4 Options. The first 2 options can be used in Videos and Animations/Films aswell. 1. Hair Cards (tons of planes with transparent hair texture) 2. Hair Particles (Optionally can be converted into a mesh) The other 2 options is what people use if they want to make "Anime" Characters. 3. Stylized Hair (individual Hair strands copied and pasted and aligned) 4. Flat Modelled Hair (Everything is just 1 giant plane, solidifed, SUBD, extra loopring/edge creases for sharpness)

[@RomboutVersluijs]

Kinda missed the part on how that new hair object had the same vertex groups and weight paining as the old model?

[@TheRoyalSkies]

Sure, if you have weight painted something on an old rig, you can bring it to the new rig without having to re-weight paint it as long as the bones are the same -

[@RomboutVersluijs]

@@TheRoyalSkies true but that means that new mesh or object needs to have vertex groups and the weight paining to be exactly the same as the old model. Transferring over bones does not transfer over weightmap painting. So I guess your new model was somehow expanded from the old model. But still it would have need a operation to transfer over the weightmap painting. That part was not really clear in this video

[@RomboutVersluijs]

@@TheRoyalSkies ps what do you mean by rig? To me a rig is the armature. Or do you mean armature and mesh object together?

[@kenalpha3]

@@RomboutVersluijs What was the answer? "what do you mean by rig?"

[@RomboutVersluijs]

@@kenalpha3 rig is sort of a different name for armature. Mostly it's the complete setup

[@BarrettSmithBB]

This is a dumb question, but what is the problem this tutorial is solving? Like, as a very new Blender user, do you not have to re-rig stuff every time?

[@RomboutVersluijs]

Adding a new mesh and reuse old rig parts

[@darrennew8211]

No, you can copy the rig from one character to another and re-use all the animations. ("Dikko" has a demo of this at the end of one of his series on character creation too.)

[@Unreality3D]

My use case is, I have an armature with body animations (from Mixamo) which has no eye bones, and another armature with eye bones properly working with my character's eyes, but no body animations, so I used this method to join just the eye bones to the animated body armature. Now I"m having trouble getting the skin from the armature with eye bones parented to the animated body, but that's a different issue.

[@kenalpha3]

@@Unreality3D Can you help give me steps? 1) I have a fully rigged character in Blender (mesh + bones + correct weight paints). 2) I want to Upload this FBX to apply Mixamo animations. 3) Mixamo wont let me upload a FBX with existing skeleton?? (or I have to rename my bones to their naming system?) 4) I also dont want to strip my skeleton because if I re rig using Mixamo to chose the elbow and wrist points - it's imperfect because the preview window is too small to see. 5) What do I do? 6) I found "Mixamo Converter" by Terribilis Studio. And he has a sample FBX "SK_Mannequin_For_Mixamo.FBX." I opened in Blender and it has some bones... And Mixamo lets me upload his FBX with bones, but not mine??? 7) Thus in Blender, I want to transfer the bones from "SK_Mannequin_For_Mixamo.FBX" (which Mixamo lets me upload) > onto my Blender file 2 (my character with existing bones and weight paints). But I dont know how to transfer Mann bones (without weight paint) - to my Char bones (keep my weight paints).

[@Unreality3D]

@@kenalpha3 I apologize that I may not be much help. Mixamo is an automatic rigging system, so I would not expect it to work with existing rigs. You might be able to make a copy of your fully rigged character, remove the rig and all its weights, upload that to Mixamo, and download Mixamo animations on that copy with a Mixamo rig. Then, you might be able to import one of those animated Mixamo rigs into Blender, along with the character rigged and weight painted the way you want it, and use a plugin to remap or retarget your bone names to match the Mixamo names, that way all the Mixamo animations will work on it. I can't advise on what plugin might do that, and I don't know how to help if the bone rotations wind up mismatched, but a search for "Blender remap" or "Blender retarget" animation should bring up some helpful results.

[@TheFunDimension]

I have been away from bones for so long I am having issues doing simply things. This doesn’t meant much for me, and I’m having a lot of issues even with automatic weight painting. 😞

[@gregmerter4083]

Found an alternative kinda if you have no new bones. Make sure your bones are the same then change the armature the mesh is set to. Delete everything on the thing you are transferring except the mesh. After that just parent it and your done. Only merge armatures if your adding new bones.

[@linkart1910]

Thx Bro yoy help-me again.

[@kriegs8315]

Yes

[@ScorgeRudess]

faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaantastic day!

[@danfu6280]

To skip all BS go to 0:50

[@guggiman7197]

the bones just dont appear for me

[@BrOverShield]

ALGO!!!!

[@brasdas6044]

You are too fast and don’t explain anything, was it a race? To follow you I crushed on a tree!!

[@incrediblebat]

remove your bones

[@Skal6750]

I'm trying to transfer some new hair bones with new weights from one model to another (models are identical). however after doing these steps the new bones don't move anything at all in pose mode! What did I do wrong?