Morning All, a big fat newbie Hello from me, as i’m new to these forums and to Blender!
I’m road testing 2.55 as a possible rigging/animation solution for our little company, and have to say i like what i see so far (thank Gawd for logical shortcuts, for a start!). However, being on something of a time-budget, with other software still to check out, there’s some questions i’d appreciate some help with if poss. Apologies in advance if they’re silly, but my internet searches have not pulled up decisive answers to them so far. So here goes:
Weight painting: I’m one of those weirdos who isnt keen on brushes. Is there a way to avoid using weight brushes in Blender by just selecting vertices and assigning them to a bone?
Weighting again: is there a way to save your weighting so you can load it onto meshes in different scenes (Coming from 3DS Max, i found i used this all the time - so now i’m looking for something like a load/save icon in the Armature Modifier, but cant find one :0)
Yes, you can manually assign weights to vertices. As 2.56 is still beta software, the manual isn’t up to date. Here’s the manual on that: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Vertex_Groups
At the bottom of the page is a link to weight painting. If you do use weight painting, there is an option for auto-normalize, make sure that’s on. This way if you add weight to a vertex for one bone, weight will be subtract from the vertex for any other bones assigned. My opinion is you will never be able to manually assign vertex groups and get as good a job as you will by weight painting. And weight painting I would think would be faster that manually assigning.
For the second one, no, I don’t think you can do this in blender. AFAIK, the weight is assigned to vertices and there is no way to transfer them. I might be wrong and have an idea how it might work, but I can’t test it - I’m rendering, at the moment. It might be possible to reshape a weight painted mesh to look like a different one, but they would have to have the same amount of vertices, using shape keys. Like I said, I can’t test…
As a side note, AFAIK, in 2.55 in weight painting mode, if you grab (g-key), rotate (r-key), or scale (s-key) a bone, you cannot clear that via the hot keys alt-g, alt-r, alt-s. That feature is in 2.56a and I’m always posing armatures while weight painting…
So i guess if someone could write a script to save vertex groups (including weight) then that would in theory load okay onto an identical mesh in another scene, providing all the mesh/bone names were identical…?
I’m also still getting to grips with datablocks and copying attributes, and wondering if they might help in saving weighting in some way…? (sort of a stab in the dark)
PS: Usefully, that translation reset shortcut you mentioned does seem to work in 2.55 after all - handy stuff!
Ok, I thought the clear translation was broken in 2.55, guess I’m wrong, haven’t did much rigging lately, last time I did anything major it was 2.54. One quick thing while I am thinking of it, blender can also automatically weight paint your mesh, basically it gives you a good starting point. Select the mesh, shift select the armature and ctrl-p to parent the mesh to the armature. You will then be given a few options like ‘create vertex groups’ and the one I’m thinking of is ‘generate from bone heat’, or something like that and it also adds the armature modifier to the mesh.
Anyway, didn’t check out my idea on copying weight paint to a new mesh, and I’m rendering again. :spin: My thoughts are this: I’m thinking you can use a different mesh object to create a shape key for the current mesh object, then I think you can apply the shape key as a permanent shape for the mesh. It would work like this - load in the fully weight painted character, append the mesh of the next character, copy the shape of the new character as a shape key to the finished character, apply the shape key to finished character, save as new character. It’s just an idea, I don’t know if it would work, but I’ll try to test it later…
No, I tried a few methods to get one mesh to match a different mesh to copy vertex groups and I couldn’t find a way to get it to work… The tools just aren’t there…