Could anybody enlighten me on the relationship between vertex groups selected by hand and vertex groups selected by weight painting?
I needed to set up weights for a bunch of bones, so to make the painting easier, I created and named vertex groups through box selection. Then, going into weight painting mode, I added softening to the edges and refined the selection. While the created vertex groups showed up as red in the weight painting window, meaning that they were reacting, I’ve found all sorts of anomalies cropping up, such as areas outside the original selection showing as highlighted, stray verts being left out of the paint, etc. In fact, after a while of painting, when I went back to the original vertex selections to see what was causing the distortions in my bone effects, I found that the vertex maps as revealed by the vertex group tab had little resemblance either to the original selections or, more importantly, to what I’d painted. Luckily, I was able to restore things by deleting the groups and repainting.
So, are vertex groups and weight painting supposed to be mutually supporting, or should they generally be kept separate? Is this a bugor have I just been beating on something I shouldn’t have?
And I just think of each method as a differnent tool for doing the same job. Envelopes are good for making rough sketches of your vertex groups. It’s quick and it actually works pretty good and blender does this automatically if you parent your armature to mesh.
But of course it isn’t good enough. So then you need to use the other two methods to add in the detail.
Make sure you deactivate envelopes because that coudl cause you trouble.
Also, so far as priorites of influence are concerned
Weight Paint > Vertex Assignment == Envelopes
So in other words Weight Paint will act in an additive manner no matter how you set your V groups or Envelopes.
So in other words Weight Paint will act in an additive manner no matter how you set your V groups or Envelopes.
AH! I think that’s what happened! I expected to be able to “trim back” with paint, but instead, it seemed only to expand the influence…sometimes onto other limbs. Shouldn’t be a problem now.
