Hi, I have been watching weight paint tutorials and have a question re: distortion of my posed character.
I used “Automatic Weights” to parent the bones to my low poly mesh and as expected there is some bad deformation when posing the character in the legs, chest and upper arm (see 2)
Q1. Will weight painting the affected deformed areas (even if low poly) and return the mesh to it’s original shape while still maintaining the pose I want?
Q2. Do I weight paint the “bone” or… do I weight paint the “mesh” associated with the deformed area. I ask because I weight painting the mesh and it started to shrink the whole mesh (maybe because it was too low poly)
Q.3 Are there other solutions to remedy these deformed areas that I can do before or after I parent the bones to the mesh like using a “Bone Constraint” etc. Looking for ways to limit the deformation.
Hello, do you even want to deform your mesh? If not, don’t use parent With Automatic Weights, instead separate each part and Ctrl P (parent to) > Bone, or don’t separate and parent With Empty Groups then assign each part to the good vertex group
It all depends on what you want, if you want no deformation at all, there are the 2 methods I cite. For the first one, you first need to have separate objects: The left arm, the right arm, the head, etc. Then select one object, shift select the armature, switch it to Pose mode, select the bone to which you want to parent the object and Ctrl P (Set Parent to) > Bone.
You weight paint the mesh. You can’t weight paint the bone, it’s not something that makes any sense. When you weight paint, what you’re doing is assigning bone influences to vertices: you want this vertex to move halfway with this bone and halfway with that bone, or three-fourths and one-fourth, or whatever.
Yes, what moonboots is saying. A lego character should probably be bone parented rather than armature deformed.
Ok, thanks to both of you. I tried it and it works well except for I have a couple of issues.
I still may need to be able to bend the foot and leg so I selected the leg mesh and only the leg bones (see image). I then selected (CTRL + P > With Automatic Weights) and there was distortion of the mesh as expected.
Q. I was reading up on bones in the Blender manual and am wondering is the best method just to weight paint the mesh if it distorts or would one of the other parenting options work better?
Hi, I parented the head bone only to the head and the torso bones only to the torso. When I selected my saved pose this is the result so. (Please Ignore the leg bones sticking out because I have not parented them yet.)
Q. Do you know why the torso is not following the pose of the torso bones?
About weight corrections, you can either do it in Weight Paint mode or you can remove or assign your vertices to a vertex group in the Object Data panel > Vertex Groups, select the vertices, select the group to which you want to assign, click on the Assign button
When you parent with the Armature Deform options it will create a series of vertex group for your mesh that have the same name as your bones, it will also create an Armature modifier, and the bones are supposed to control the vertex groups that have the same names. If you choose With Automatic Weights it will automatically assign the vertices to the vertex groups, depending on the proximity of the vertices to the bone that has the same name. If you choose With Empty Groups, it will create the vertex groups but won’t assign any vertex to them, you’ll have to do it manually (good solution when you need to be precise).
