[Bf-funboard] Some skinning feature ideas

[Tony Mullen]

Hi,

I have a couple of things I'd like to be able to do while skinning which are
not currently implemented as far as I know.  If these features do exist,
then by all means let me know, and apologies for bothering people.  If they
aren't such hot ideas, I'd like to know that too.

1) I would like to be able to create empty vertex groups for all (and only)
deform bones with one click.  Workflow here is currently a bit indirect.
The only method I know to create these vertex groups at present is to use
the W key in weight paint mode with envelopes selected, which automatically
assigns weights for the vertex groups which means that in addition to
assigning clean weights, all the mis-assigned envelope weights need to be
cleaned up as well.

2) I mentioned this in the devs forum but never heard any responses to it,
so I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not.  I think it might be nice to
have a normalized mode or normalization step for bone weights, such that
multiple bone weights were normalized for each vertex that they were applied
to (that is, all weights on a given vert add to one).  This way, I can
simply assign two bones weights of one, and the verts where those groups
overlap would be *automatically* interpreted as .5 weights for each bone.
At present, .5 values need to be assigned by hand to the verts which are
affected by both bones.  This could be a mode, or it could be simply a
"normalize weights" button that recalculated weights accordingly.  I could
be wrong, but I think that this interpretation of overlapping weights tends
more often to be the desired interpretation.

3) It'd be great to have an easy way to remove a selected vert(s) from all
of the vertex groups it is a member of.  This is easy enough to do with a
script, I think, but it seems to be basic enough functionality not to have
to need a script.

Again, apologies if any or all of these features already exist.  I'm always
learning things I didn't know about in Blender.

Tony
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://projects.blender.org/pipermail/bf-funboard/attachments/20070402/fd996f99/attachment.html