I’m having some problems with weight painting my mesh, which is actually not a fully enclosed mesh but instead some parts are just kind of put in place. the object, in other words, is several meshes that have been joined into it. Problem is, while I am weight painting, even though the two segments are heated to a bone by weight painting, they come apart when deformed. any solutions?
Hum… i guess there will always be some seams problem with this technic.
- You can create an extra peace of mesh to hide the seam at the joinings
- Or make the peaces of the object or character to need visible joints (robot like)
- Use softbodies to have flappy seams
- Shapes keys to correct the seams synchronism at certain gestures
Yet someone else might give you much better hints… Good luck anyway 
Not really… Thats why your told to join meshes before ‘boning’ them. Almux has pointed out some rather good workarounds, but unless the mesh is joined you will have deformation problems at the joints. Its just the way it is, since each mesh will look only into itself as far as boning and bone weight, etc, and pretty much has no way of knowing the other mesh is there; ergo it will never take verti positions of the other mesh into account.
Although…
IF for some reason you HAD too? I’d use an empty to stitch them sort of. Parent the empty to verti in the one mesh, and then 'Hook Deform" the other verti to the empty. Obviously, this would only work if there are only one or two problem verti… And the seam will still be rather visible during renders because the verti normals also will not match up, creating a very visible seam with the faces on one side being a different shade than the other.
thanks for the replies. Actually, I found that using an armature modifier caused the detached parts to not be hooked up to the bones, even if weight painted. But, i parented the mesh to the armature instead with no groups, and after painting it the pieces stuck.
In fact, for what i understood, when you Weight Paint a mesh to an Armature, you create automatically groups having the bone’s name it’s weighted to… (hope i’m not all wrong, here…!)
One thing could also be to fake a Material’s “mixing” by having an Alpha to 50% value at the seams… ;p
@Star Ranger4,
Could you have the different meshes with their OWN MATERIAL each BEFORE joining them, to have the textures seamed at the joints once it gets to a unique object?? (That would be real nice!!
As far as I know, yes. Joining two meshes should preserve both their materials and their UV mapping unless you do something silly like exceed the 16 material limit…