I’m working on my model, trying to rig the super saiyan 3 hair and the problem is just getting it right. I looked at the game for reference and I cant match it.
It doesn’t help that vertices are disconnected and i’m sure you’re thinking
“why not just merge them?”
because it ruins the mesh itself and its appearance. I tried it before. It doesn’t work out. Some spots you can get away with but the rig itself looks off cause it bends in the wrong way. I just can’t figure out how to do it properly. I’m halfway there but its still messed up in alot of places
So what is exactly the problem?
If the disconnected mesh is giving you trouble weighting it correctly, connect the mesh (use sharp edges, etc to keep the shading like it is suppose to be).
The problem is I just cant get the weight paint right. I’m struggling to figure it out with something like this. some parts deform, some parts stretch to much and fixing it makes vertices stretch. I cant figure out how to balance it all out
In weight painting mode, do you have auto normalize turned on? Without it it’s very hard to get everything right. And how much deformation do you need in the hair? If you need only slight simple movement you could just use a singe bone for the whole hair, make it bendy with like 10 segments, and add tangent control bones to the front and back of the bone to control the bending of it. If the weight painting itself is the biggest problem, you could make a very simple copy of the hair with very simple topology, weight paint it properly, then separate the hair if it’s part of the character mesh, and then transfer weights from the simple hair. You will need to do minor corrections, but it should give you a good starting point.
If the open edges give you trouble with weighting, make a copy, merge vertices along the edges, do your weight painting. Then, after done, transfer the weights from merged to original using Transfer Weights command or Data Transfer modifier
that could work but there’s one problem. It would stretch parts that shouldn’t move since some hair strands are connected. But i’ll give that a try and see what happens
Ehh… Usually it’s just the opposite… What kinds of trouble could auto normalize cause? Because auto normalize means that it makes every vertex that you paint automatically to have the sum value of the assigned weights to be 1. In practice this means that when you paint weight to some bone, it automatically subtracts the weights of other bones. If you paint something fully red, it will remove all the weight from other bones from that area. If you leave it off then you might paint something to be fully deformed by a certain bone, but without even knowing it the area might have weights from other distant bones left, so they will affect the deformation unless you manually subtract them. Also what brushes are you using when painting? I normally use only add brush, because then I can gradually add weight to problematic areas and see how it affects. Sometimes I use subtract brush, but it can sometimes move the weights to wrong bones (that’s basically the only problem I can think of that auto normalize could cause). But it is easily avoided when using add brush as much as you can. But why are you so hesitant about merging the vertices? If it’s a shading issue, you can easily correct that in ways that people here suggested. And if you really want all the individual strands to move separately then you will not be succesful with such a small amount of bones… If you really need more realistic hair behaviour then you might need to simulate it using cloth simulations or something. One problem with your current weights is that your bones are deforming the hair strands and hair tips above them, naturally the bones should only affect the hair strands that begin from the starting area of the bone, and below. But not above.
because auto normalize messes with other weight and ruins hours of progress. I can get one part done right but because I left auto normalize on it ruins everything and I got to backtrack and start again. Every. Single. Time. I use autonormalize it ruins everything. So I just never lose it. It’s more trouble than its worth and I hate having it on.
Well, you can do your work the way you want, you don’t need to use auto normalize if you don’t want to. But I still need to ask: are you sure you have diagnosed the problem correctly? Because even if you don’t normalize the weights, they still influence each other on every area that they overlap. But having not normalized weights it makes it way more difficult to see how. It sounds like normalizing weights does not “ruin” anything, it just reveals the real problems in your weight painting. Auto normalize is supposed to change other weights too, because that’s how the weights interact anyway, and normalized weights are balanced in a way that you can see their interactions clearly. It might give you a false sense of control having not normalized the weights, but in my opinion it will just give you more headache. But as I said, it’s your work, you don’t need to use anything you are not comfortable with. There’s not right or wrong, just pros and cons with the tools. I’m just giving my opinion based on my own experience.
Ok there are a few things you can do to improve this mesh, try this:
Select the mesh go to edit mode> faces>tris to quads.
Select the mesh again in edit mode> clean up> by distance unselected+ sharp edges. 0.001.
Then go back to weight painting and smooth between the bones weights with the blur brush.
to tell you the truth im stunned. The screenshot is exactly what I wanted to accomplish! It’s almost an exact replica of how the hair flops in the game. Cause it does that when you fly down.
is there any downsides? It’s blender there’s ALWAYS a catch. It’s too easy. Something must of gone wrong. Did the uv map get messed up? Does the mesh lose it’s intended look? Did it deform?
Could you just fix the UVs manually? It shouldn’t be too much work. Or you could transfer weights from the @digitvisions 's mesh to the original and see how it works. I don’t see any catastrophic problems here tbh…
