Where are the bones?

Szling

I've imported a mesh to my project and want to add a bone so I can animate it properly rather than just setting it as a child of a generic Node3D and animating that but I can't find the proper bone node to do so. I've tried Skeleton3D, PhysicalBone3D, PhysicalBoneSimulator3D, and BoneAttachment3D but all of them want to interact with some other bone node that I can't find, not even the in-engine documentation links to this node type.

So I would like to know: How do I add bones and paint weights to the mesh?

Zeftax

Szling I think it would be better to add bones in your modelling program, but if you want to do it in redot there is no bone node - the bones are a part of the Skeleton3D (which should be a parent of the mesh). It does have a method add_bone() which you can call programatically, but I am not actually aware of a way to do it in-editor - which I'd take as a hint that this workflow is not really well supported.

Szling

Zeftax Unfortunately the modeling program I'm using does not have any rigging/animation tools as it's actually CAD software. (works great for the things it does offer though). I've attempted to use blender to add bones and weight painting, but the actively hostile design of blender's UI prevented those efforts from actually producing anything useful.

Zeftax

Szling Haha, I definitely know that feel, I am just getting started with blender and I have only used bricscad/autocad (or solid edge, but that was a long time ago) for modelling before. But IMO the investment into learning blender is worth it. I found this tutorial to be really helpful with some basic rigging, there is also a more detailed tutorial on the same channel - but this one should be good enough for the basics. For modelling, I really liked the teaching style found in this tutorial, he first shows the whole process, then all the steps individually before explaining them - so you always know why the thing you're learning to do happens, not just how.