Howdy, I’m new here. I’ve been asking this anywhere I can and no one seems to have an answer yet. Hoping that changes here.
I am certain that my Weight Painting Mode is broken.
For starters, I noticed that using the auto normalize toggle did nothing. I could apply something with the strength of 1.0 and none of the other influences would be reduced in the slightest. However, my guess is that this is just a side effect of the real issue.
When I selected one of the vertices I painted over and checked the section labeled “Vertex Weights” under the “Item” section of the sidebar, I noticed that while the weight was added to the “All” and “Other” sections, the “Deform” section hade NONE of the weights I painted, only the things that automatic weights had applied.
To test, I reproduced parenting with automatic weights and repainting the same part of my model and I got the same results. I then parented with empty weights and lo and behold, the “All” and “Other” sections had the data I painted and the “Deform” section was completely empty. This is very easy to reproduce on my end.
tl;dr: It appears that this “Deform” attribute is what I need to be editing with my weight painting tools, but for some reason, my tools do not currently effect these values and I have no idea how to fix this. I imagine there is a simple solution, like a checkbox or two, that I have simply missed. Thanks in advance!
Autonormalization might only be affecting deform bones. It doesn’t work in certain circumstances (notably, gradients, but there are probably plenty of others.)
Not sure what you mean. You don’t apply weights to All or Other sections; you apply it to individual vertex groups. Other/deform are a way for Blender to organize these vertex groups: deform groups are groups with the same names as bones in the (an?) armature that the mesh object is getting deformed by.
I think you might just have some low-level misunderstandings of how vertex groups are supposed to work. If you link a file, then give exact instructions, along with what you expect to happen, I’m sure I could tell you how to get what you want, whether Blender is screwing up (it happens sometimes), and/or why what you expect isn’t what you should expect from those actions.
Edit: yup, tested; autonormalization only takes deforming bones into account. Which is how it should be, IMO.
And the bone that you just moved was named “Ear.L.003”-- same capitalization and everything? And that bone didn’t have its “deform” property disabled? And the mesh has an armature modifier, referencing that armature object, that isn’t disabled?
A good place to upload .blend files (that are small) is pasteall.org. That would let me see what’s going on a lot faster.
Yes, the bone and vertex group share the same name. Just double checked that now.
And oh my goodness… These bones had deform turned off! I KNEW IT WAS A SIMPLE SOLUTION I KEPT OVERLOOKING!!! And looking at it now, a bunch of my bones apparently don’t have deform turned on either! I guess I must have clicked it on accident for a few of them, I’m going to have to scour through this and see if I did this anywhere else other than where I intended.
Seems like this works. I’ll play with it for a bit and if there are no answers, I’ll mark this as the solution. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
If they’re all supposed to have deform enabled, you can just select all the bones and alt-click in the deform field to change the value for all of them at once.
