How to add a base bone after other bones have been created? What I'm trying to do is create a robotic hand. I created the mesh and added the bones for the fingers (following CG Cookies' tutorial on rigging fingers), but didn't add a bone for the "arm" part of the mesh.

I've tried adding the bone (the arm bone is named Bone.020), created a vertex group with the same name, then weight painted the part it should move, but that didn't work. I have tried parenting the finger bones to the arm bone, but that didn't work. I don't know what else to do. Any help is greatly appreciated.


View of the Object Data panel


View of the Bone panel


View of the Bone Constraints panel


Showing the fingers are working properly


The problem - Rotating the arm doesn't pivot where the "elbow" would be


Example of weight paint that works with thumb


The weight paint area for the arm and palm


Armature modifier in the modifiers panel
What is going on here is strange, and I can't really determine what is going on.  For whatever reason, no matter what I do, The hand does not follow that particular bone.

I just wound up remaking the bone, that seemed to get around whatever strangeness was happening.

I didn't bother rebuilding the parenting of the bones for the sake of this screenshot.