[Bf-funboard] Some skinning feature ideas

[Michael Crawford]

On Apr 2, 2007, at 4:49 PM, Bassam Kurdali wrote:

> Hi Tony, Roland answered some of your other questions, here's one he
> didn't:
> 2) vertex weights are normalized for bones already- you can assign a
> weight of one to each bone and they mix fifty fifty- no "greater than
> one" or "less than one" weights are allowed to a vertex. If you  
> assign a
> vertex a weight of 0.1 to one bone, and no other bone influences, it
> will have an effective weight of 1.

What he said.  It's a much smarter way of weighting than other  
applications in my opinion (more in a sec).   What's great is that  
you never have to worry about all influences adding up to 1.

> For cleaning up, there is a "clean weights" script that removes  
> (with a
> threshold) vertexes with weights close to zero from a group. I  
> think it
> lets you iterate over all groups too. This is not exactly the same as
> what you were asking, but it is handy.
>
> PS vertex weight normalization could benefit in some situations by  
> being
> accessible to the rigger- I believe maya does this- on the other  
> hand, I
> recall reading a maya rigging book saying you would never need/want to
> turn it off.

Really?  Try painting weights in maya sometime.  It's hell.  It's so  
utterly broken it's almost a running joke in maya circles.  Because  
of this normalization "feature" subtracting (or smoothing) weight  
from one bone adds the weight quite randomly all across the skeleton  
(ending up with the foot bone influencing the face for example).   
It's buggy, it's broken, it hasn't been fixed since smooth skinning  
was introduced.  To some extent, this can be resolved with maya's  
"prune weights" script (immediately after binding), but it rarely  
resolves all the problems and users are forced to jump through hoops,  
often having to resort to manually re-assigning all weights before  
painting.  Maya's manual and many books (the best known of which are  
proudly endorsed by Alias/Discreet) make it sound like a walk in the  
park...  Blender's method of weight painting is a godsend in my  
opinion.  Please don't change it.

> PSS If we get multi-modifiers or nodal modifiers then the issue of
> normalization will pop up again, this time in regards to vertexes  
> under
> the influence of several modifiers.
>
> Bassam
>
>
>
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