Weight Painting for Blender is horrible. It is a talent to weight paint and being able to fine tune with ease and precision requires more tools than what we are given with Blender. I find it as difficult as painting the Mona Lisa with a roller brush.
No smooth brush is a deal breaker.
I know there’s a smooth function but it is not useful for fine tuning.
There’s the blur brush but that doesn’t work either as it is a compromise for a smoothing brush.
Blur brush VS smooth brush
Blur takes all the vertex values under the brush and averages it to be applied to its brush profile.
Smooth tool takes every single vertex under the brush and compares all its neighbors values and assigns an average.
After a couple of months, I got passed the FBX hurdle, the 200+ shortcut keys, the wrong sided selection method, the lack of a proper manual, all of Blender’s quarks. Mastered! Then I’m faced with an inferior tool and there is nothing I can do, it is quite discouraging.
I wonder if plugins exist for a better weight painting tool? I would pay for that.
I have to agree here. I hate weight painting in blender. I always thought that maybe I was just missing something so it’s a bit discouraging to find out otherwise.
And yes, a smooth tool like Maya’s would be godly.
I use select loops and assign a value to the loop, then select less, assign a new value, select less, assign a new value,
This allows fine grain control without painting weights.
PS, I think there was talk on the mailing list about painting weights as a gsoc.
It may be possible to write your own bvhtree accelerated weight painter in python,
In 2.77 they added a sphere test to mathutils bvhtree, but you probably would want to have the armature modifier hidden so you would not need to update the positions in the tree as they were moved by the armature modifier*
?? You should try to learn the tool before claiming it is incompetent…
There is “blur” brush which will smooth the weight based on the brush size and weight properties. Also I advise you to use wireframe shading while weightpainting since it will switch to a shadeless mode (special view mode for weightpaint).
Aside from that the ability to face/vert mask so you can precisely paint verts. And if you are a fan of “Weight Table” from the AD products. you also have the ability to manipulate weights of a vert from the properties panel (N) simply by selecting it in edit mode or using vertex/face mask in weight paint mode.
Never mind the ability the swap weights and “dynamicaly paint” them using other objects and “Dynamic paint”.
I don’t see why the smooth tool isn’t useful for fine tuning, I mean, you select a bunch of vertices and smooth their weights. Isn’t that what you’re asking for?
Anyway, I agree and personally I only use automatic weighting and the smooth tool. And manually setting weights for stuff like the head.
I think the OP is adressing a missing feature for better weight painting - and that is the smooth brush.
Blur doesnt do it (it also adresses neighbouring points which might be unwanted).
May be important to mention the Vert Selecting Button (like yii7), which lets you select the verts to smooth in weight paint mode.
By the way, instead of asking to make Blenders tools more like another application - its more helpful to explain how they should be improved.
Though in this case I think I can guess whats meant in comments here, I rather know than guess.
Either way, we’ve already had some nice improvements to the usability of weight painting for 2.77 and it’s very nice to see things be even further improved for 2.78 (providing that is the next planned released as opposed to 2.8x).
I also found the blur brush kind of iffy, so this is welcome for me as well.
By the way, instead of asking to make Blenders tools more like another application - its more helpful to explain how they should be improved.
Though in this case I think I can guess whats meant in comments here, I rather know than guess.
I don’t get this at all. Weight painting in Blender is pretty good. I’ve found it to be very responsive and found I can get very precise results relatively easily. Also corrective morphs are a breeze and it’s the easiest most fluid process I’ve used in that regard… Just for the record. Most previous rigging and skin weighting experience was Maya and Max.They are all three a bit different from each other. All very good at what they do.
I do have a suggestion. The smooth tool works OK, but it requires a vertex selection to work. I love that you can limit it’s effect to just selected verticies, but I would expect it to smooth the vertex weghts of my currently selected bone, which it doesn’t seem to do… Exactly. I’m honestly a little confused as to what it’s doing. I really want to be able to perform a “flood fill” operation with mysmooth brush, but can’t seem to figure out how. What is the smooth tool doing specifically to my weights? Im finding it hard to predict it’s behavior.
@dragonskung This is Blender is community based project it is good to start a complain but we will need your follow up, for the devs to improve Blender. I know that CGI is pretty busy business, please comment and tell your workflow may be some others may help you with your problem and smooth your way in. And yes Weight painting is under documented.
@ideasman42 Thanks for smoothing the blur brush, it working much better.
I have simple .blend, link below, it has 2 armatures and 2 meshes.
The first one is just the normal one mesh and an armature, when you parent the armature to the mesh, automatic weigh, you will have a good rigging behavior every bones get some good weight.
In the second, parent the armature to the mesh you will see how Blender fails. No need to explain just see for yourself. I encounter this problem usually when i have detached mesh but one object (head apart, hands, shoes, …) thanks in advance for looking into this.
Sorry for hijacking the thread, yes Blender fanboy behavior when we see your post we just jump and start to beg for feature
Sorry, it’s hard to explain. What I mean by “flood fill” is similar to what the smooth option in the toolbar seems to do. It essentially does a smooth of the whole vertex group at once. If you do a “flood fill” with a blur brush, it would flood the vertex group with a blur. The smooth tool does this, but the workflow is slow because it requires a vertex selection first before it can do anything. Also, it’s behavior doesn’t seem to work as expected, which is why i asked what it was doing behind the scenes. I’ll do some additional testing tonight to try a d articulate better what I’m trying to say here…
