I am relatively new to blender, and I have just gotten to the rigging stage. My problem is that after I assign weight values to my groups and attempt to pose the character, the weights are not take into account. The program simply rotates the vertices as if their weight was 1. Can somebody give me a fix for this?
Each vertex must have a weight associated with at least two bones for the relative weighting to work properly. Blender normalizes vertex weights when processing an animation, which means all influences on a vertex are shifted proportionally until the total weight of all equals 1.0. In the absence of another bone’s influence, any weight you apply gets normalized to 1.0.
Ok, that seemed to work. Just sucks that now I get to do double the weight painting for both the parent and child bone. Anyway, thanks a bunch.
One way around too much additional painting is to use a bone that will never move (ever), set it to deform, then apply a low weight to it for the entire model. This provides the necessary additional weight but doesn’t need to be painted initially (apply it in the Properties>Vertex Groups panel); later on, it can be painted either stronger or weaker depending on what the other bones need. You’ll still be painting joints and blending influences for other bones, but you’ll never have a case where your weight is automatically set to 1.0 by normalization.