Help Understanding Normalize

okay, i don’t get this.

‘normalize makes all the vertex weights add up to 1,’ right? but… aren’t the ‘red’ vertices weighted with 1? so if there’s 50 red vertices, won’t the weight = 50? why would you reduce it from 50 to 1?

secondly, i’m trying to paint with auto normalize on. based on this post/tips: https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/155246-blender-the-weighting-game/

which basically says… you lock all the bones except the one you are working on and… i THINK the parent of it. if you do that, you can use auto normalize while you are painting, instead of normalizing by pressing a button and somehow messing everything up…

here’s my problems…

https://img00.deviantart.net/0c8b/i/2018/057/f/b/wip_by_bloodsong13t-dc4dv7n.png

1: on the left: automatic bone weighting.
first question: the bone is in the middle of the mesh body. why is there weight only on the back of the figure?? shouldn’t it be like red right around the bone? and fade near the ends?

2: middle: painting in subtract mode.
if i spray the airbrush there in the middle, the colour fades bluer, darker, and eventually turns off (black).

3: right: painting in subtract mode with auto normalize turned on.
i do the same subtracting spray, and it ADDS full red weights. WUT???

why is it doing that? (is this methodology TOTALLY outdated and i should not use it???)

(lastly, does anybody know if there is a version of poser that will export a dae or other file that preserves its joint weight maps that i could import into blender? sorry, for me, poser = 20 years, blender = … :confused: )

okay, i figured out normalize.

it doesn’t set ALL the point weights to equal 1, it sets EACH point’s weights to equal 1! (grammar is important sometimes! :P)

also, i fixed my painting problem, and found out that method was NOT a good thing to do. can i mark this as solved/no longer relevant? thanks!
(still want to do all my work on poser, though :X)

Yes… some of the weight painting problems with blender are being addressed in some of the new updates…
but weight painting in general in all the 3D software is a real pain anywayz… I hate it… personally…

the fewer verts your model has the better off you are just using Weight Assigning instead of weight painting…

see more here…

I recomend you watch the whole video…
however the most pointiant part of the video addressing weigth assigning starts about half way through so skip ahead if you feel you know everything mentioned in the first half… around 11:30 in…