I’ve got a hand model with a nicely skinned armature. The hand only looks good with subsurfs, so to make it work in the game engine, I need to convert the subsurf to mesh. The problem is, although the newly created object has the same named vertex groups as the old one it is a conversion of, none of the vertexes are actually assigned to any groups. So armature posing doesn’t work at all.
Does anyone know of any way I could convert subsurf to mesh so that vertex groups are conserved?
I’m using 2.36 but will glady start using 2.41 when it comes!
Not sure that it’s possible, since when you convert subsurf to mesh, you are creating new vertices. You may have to add these new verts to your vertex groups.
Thanks dschnell. I figured that was the reason… but I figured convert subsurf to mesh would probably copy the original vertices and then interpolate new ones, in which case it ought to be able to assign the copied vertices to the same groups as before, and the interpolated ones to the same group as the nearest copied one…
Oh well, looks like I have a fair bit of tedious re-skinning to do…
You can use this script to project the weights from the old mesh to the new one, interpolating weights and saving you all the work (the idea came from a guy in a forum in Spanish):
This script doesn’t make a good job for what it was conceived in the first place. But I have tested it to work very well for your case, because both meshes have their vertex normals aligned.
Thanks Jorge! That script is indeed supposed to do more or less exactly what I need…
The only problem is it’s pretty bad at it, with my model at least. I’ve got vertices groups formed which miss out really obvious vertices and include vertices from miles away. Something up with the algorithm…
Anyway I’ve decided to use a different hand model now that is a bit more detailed and might not need subsurfing. So hopefully I can avoid this issue…