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

[Bastien Montagne]

I also think having a way to distinguish between vertices belonging to a 
group (even at zero weight) and vertices not in the group would be a 
nice improvement.

Another area where keeping "zero-vertices" in a group can be useful is 
in modeling, where groups are very handy to regroup some vertices, to 
easily (de)select/show/hide/whatever them.

On 14/02/2013 16:22, Gaia wrote:
> On 14.02.2013 13:09, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
>> 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?
> Because it is relevant for some usage scenarios outside of blender.
>
> I am 100% with you regarding "hide the technical details". And indeed this
> specific detail might best be hidden from the user as long as we keep
> everything inside of Blender where this detail is unimportant.
>
> But actually it becomes very important when we look outside of the Blender
> universe. And indeed this little difference between unreferenced verts and
> zero weighted verts has a huge impact on the display of 3D objects in our
> game environment.
>> 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.
> We already have dark blue as the color for zero weight. No need to
> change that.
> "not referenced by any weight group" is a bit fuzzy, because weight
> groups can
> be used for very different and unrelated purposes, so this visualization
> would be
> pointless imho.
>
> But i still believe that getting a visual feedback for "not referenced
> by this bone"
> is a very useful information. (See next comment below) And actually i do
> not
> understand where that is a technical "detail" (apart from "blender
> doesn't care
> so the user should not care either" ... but the universe cares, so do
> users ...)
>>> 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.
> But it is not about automatically removing zero weighted verts. it is about
> feedback about unreferenced weights and feedback about "unintentionally
> belonging
> to this vertex group" verts. Exporters can not reliably handle that
> automatically.
>
> One very simple example:
>
> During weighting you unintentionally added some barely noticeable very low
> weighted areas in the head of your beloved character while you where
> painting
> on a foot bone.  yes this can be avoided, nevertheless it happens.
>
> Now try to find these verts on areas which do not belong to the active
> bone...
> Try to find less dark spots of blue in a sea of dark blue. Mimicry works
> well here :)
>
> Ok, i hear you telling me i can use the "clean weights" tool and be
> happy. But what
> if i intentionally WANT to have some weights to be set close to zero (or
> even zero) ?
> Then cleaning the weights might ruin my weight maps.
>
> And again it sounds very appealing to me: If we had unreferenced weights be
> displayed in black, we could quickly  step through the vertex groups and
> see
> blue spots in the black seas and that's much easier to spot. well...
>
> If that still doesn't make it clear why it is a useful improvement, then
> i am running
> out of argumentative ideas for now :)
>
> cheers,
> Gaia
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