[Bf-committers] Weight paint: display unreferenced verts in black instead of blue ?

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Gaia <gaia.clary at machinimatrix.org> wrote:
> So i have to ask back: Where would it be bad to get a visual
> information about unreferenced vs. referenced verts  using
> the black/blue color code ?

I would think that we should improve our tools so that there are never
any vertices part of a vertex group with weight zero, and not let the
user worry about this at all. Why burden the user with an
implementation detail?

I can see a visualization being useful where vertices with zero/no
weight are shown in a different color so that you can quickly spot if
vertices are part of any group, but this should then make no
distinction between the vertices being internally part of the group or
not.

> There are situations where knowing if a vertex is referenced
> (even with zero weight) becomes relevant. It can even be
> wanted that verts are members of a vertex group but weighted
> to zero (or almost zero). And in such a case cleaning up low/zero
> weighted vertices with blender cleanup tool might be not practical.
> And seeing them all in blue doesn't help either.
>
> One case where it is mandatory to have each vertex be placed in
> at least one vertex group is when it comes to create items for
> game engines outside of Blender. Yes, we already have added a
> lot of helper tools to our own addons for finding unreferenced
> verts, visualising them, forbid to export partially unweighted
> meshes, etc.
>
> However getting this little extra visual control would help as well.

I can see game engine exporters need vertices to all be part of some
group, but if like Blender they only consider weight > 0 to be really
part of a group then this can work fine still without exposing
implementation details to the user.

Brecht.