I’m pretty new to Blender and I’m having issues figuring out how to preserve weight painting when importing a face model.
I’m trying to convert a face to a game and for that purpose I’m using the armature from an original game model. The face armature has many smaller bones and in order to have face animations, I must connect the vertices to the respective bones. But my problem is that I can’t properly paint all face areas. I’ve already did the easier ones (eyes, eyelids and eyebrows) but I’m unable to do the mouth.
Here’s how the armature looks like:
Is there any easier way other than manually painting every part of the mouth area so that I could preserve/copy the weight painting from an original face model? If not, how can I do it as precise as possible so that my mouth/lips animations have quality as good as the original game models?
If your mesh is very similar to another mesh, you could transfer weights. I use a data transfer modifier to do this. Usually, on nearest face interpolated mode.
If it’s not very similar, there’ll be problems with doing that, but it’s still not a bad way to get a start on weights. A good example of a place where you’d have problems would be if you had closed mouths, with mouths that weren’t in the exact same place-- very easy to copy weights from the lower lip to the upper lip, or vice versa.
And if they’re not very similar, it’s entirely possible that existing animations won’t look good anyways. Animations are specific to the model-- to the proportions. Using animations with dissimilar armatures is something you can only kinda, sometimes get away with.
