Weight Painting

[LittleKnownDude]

I've come across a tutorial that uses weight painting to rig a mess to armatures. I was wondering if this is a good way to go or if there are easier and more efficient ways to do it.

[cookepuss]

Weight mapping/painting is (unfortunately) a must. It's not efficient in terms of time & overhead, but it usually guarantees the best results.

Many apps have auto-weighting functionality. This establishes more general envelope or field of influence to each bone & joint. In many cases, that does a decent job. Decent. Rarely does it do the job perfectly.

You usually have to go back and tweak the painted weights. Some points on the mesh might get missed. Some might be locked to the the wrong bone. Some might not have the desired influence.

The end effect is usually a vertex that pops out, moves with the wrong bone, doesn't move with the bone enough, or moves too much.

Weight painting is just something you get used to.

You can usually get away with auto-weighting if all you want is a pose instead of full on animation. If all you want is a pose, those messed up vertices are something you can fix after you've got the desired pose.

At this point, you should just be worried about getting the modeling & texturing right. Right now, getting to know your tools, the concepts, and anatomy are where its at.

Rigging is more an advanced topic. Whole books and DVDs have been written and recorded on it.

[fluxist8070]

In maya and xsi you can use the component editor(maya) Its under window>general editors> components editors.

1. select verts.
2. go to components editor.
3. you will see vert weigts assigned in a value from 0-1.
Tweak as necessary.

I like to use the component editor to do the rough edits. i.e. assigning the head bone to the head...fingers to the righ bone etc. Then, if weights neet to be smoothed (knee, shoulers pelvis) you can paint these to get the best results. Painting wieghts is tough in the beginning, but with some practice, one starts to understand what they are doing! good luck.

[nazeil]

I'm a big proponent of the component editor in maya. It's a much easier way to work with the weight values of multiple bones on a series of vertices, rather then moving up and down the bone list in the paint weights tool.

Once you've done it for awhile you'll tend to almost work on auto pilot, because weighting values are actually pretty similar across meshes. IE a knee joint across any mesh will usually have similar values of influence from the bone above the knee and the actual knee.

[femina]

Well, I'm an art major and we just finished up an assignment where we had to do a self-portrait. Anyway, one of my classmates is black but in her portrait she didn't really pay attention and it looks like she is white. During our analysis I mentioned this as something she might work on so it looked more like her such as making the skin tone look darker. Now I'm getting punished because they say it's a racially prejudiced comment. What do you think about this?

[cookepuss]

I've got a number of opinions on the issue. However, I think that this is a topic best left out of this particular thread, as it has no relevance at all. This is a thread about Weight Map Painting.

Besides, as a kid, I was always told that the 3 topics to avoid most in casual conversation are sex, religion, and politics. That rule of thumb has never failed me in my 34 years. In this racially charged climate, I'd consider this a 4th topic that should generally be avoided, especially on a forum. Even in the most controlled situations with the most sensible adults, these conversations usually get out of hand. Race is a divisive and highly charged issue.

I happily recommend that you take it all in stride. Even if your comment was harmless, please consider that people are fairly sensitive about these things. If either the student or professor felt justly offended then maybe you might have phrased your critiques in a more tactful manner. Then again, maybe you're just totally off base and what you saw is something that wasn't there. Without seeing the self-portrait in question there's no way for us to be sure either way.

Regardless. Not a topic for this thread. Probably not for this board really, imho. Nuff Said.