Weight Painting Problem

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’ve been weight-panting characters for a while now, and I’ve always managed.

This problem puzzles me because it looks very basic and it should be something I should already know how to fix.

WeightPanitingProblem.png1920×1080 483 KB

First, ignore everything outside of the problem at hand.

No matter how I paint that part and every nearby loop, it will never look smooth. Granted, this is almost as bad as it could possibly get, and I’ve got some pretty decent results, but still not completely smooth.

So, what’s up? Could it be it need some support loops? Or is it me just not painting it properly?

Thanks in advance.

2

Check to see how things are weighed on the blue area by different bone. It may be too strong by the other bones there, making it rigid.

3

If a vertex has no weight except for in a single group, it doesn’t matter how you paint it. Either it has weight, or it has not. 1 or 0. True or false. Nothing in between. If > 0, it will be 100% influenced. If 0, it will be 0% influenced. One solution is to go to the parent bone and paint very lightly in the area. Then you’ll be able to smoothly adjust the vertices for the bone in question.

4

So does blue represent the ‘off’ state when weight painting (i.e. 0.0)? Is there a way to ‘fill’ the entire mesh with a 0.001 value?

5

You could go to edit mode, select a group in Vertex Groups (in Obj Data panel), select all vertices, set weight to .001 and then “assign”. However I have found that going to parent bone and adjusting when needed works better. You can assign a stronger weight, so it becomes easier to adjust in child bone (you don’t need to use crazy small numbers in weight paint brush settings). Since the parent bone is moving the child bone anyways, it simply becomes a matter of how much the child bone should drag the parent’s bone’s vertices.

6

Thanks for all the answers, but I think I should shed some light of what this bone is moving.

This is the ear of a bunny, but it isn’t straight but bent. I originally had two bones for each part of the ear, but that wouldn’t work since it would look horrible whenever the head was animated. I have taken in consideration the weight of both bones (if this bone is 0.4 the other is 0.6, and so on), and the problem still persists.

As the first person first suggested, and as I already mentioned, I have checked both bones, and the rigidness is just an exaggeration of an almost unweighted bone. I could make it look less rigid and much smoother, but instead of being 100% smooth and 0 rigid, it was 90% smooth and 10% rigid, which is an imperfection that shouldn’t be there.

So, that’s really the problem. I was hoping to use this exaggerated imperfection to make it easier for everyone to pinpoint the problem.

Thank again.