[Bf-funboard] Re: Some skinning feature ideas

[Claudio "malefico" Andaur]

Hey interesting discussion,

I have been rigging characters for quite some time now (yeah, birds 
mostly :) ) and one thing that I had to do in many ocassions was to do 
screenshots of different vertex groups, in order to check/find wrong 
weight paint, specially in simetrical parts (sometimes, Blender loses 
track of X-axis simetry, and then paint is no longer applied equally in 
both sides).

So, the idea of having a way to "view" other vertexgroups while painting 
weights in one, sounds interesting to me.

BTW, Tony, you do know that you can pick any group that is affecting a 
certain area by shift-left-clicking on the mesh, don't you ? It will 
show you a list of all groups acting on that area. This is the fastest 
way to clean up weight paint I ever tried. This and the face select mode 
combined with SHIFT+K to fill up selected faces with a weight, are nice 
tools and will speed up your workflow if you don't know them.

About normalization I only had problems when blending armature 
deformations with other deformers likes lattices and stuff. THEN lack of 
normalization is your worst nightmare. I've heard Ton was going to work 
on multi-deformers or something that would solve this issue for once. I 
hope it is in 2.44 plans :)

The other thing I think it's worth improving is bone envelopes. Current 
system is quite limited for most cases. I mean, an ellipsoid envelope 
can't really work well with most characters. You need something that can 
be shaped in a more free way. I thought about something like B-Bones but 
where each segment can have a different scale in X, Y, or Z. This way 
you could really cover a precise volume of your mesh, thus, speeding up 
skinning by not having so many things to fix.
Envelopes are great, but they need to be worked on to be REALLY productive.

Anyway, regards.

malefico



>Message: 4
>Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 16:15:57 +0900
>From: "Tony Mullen" <tony.mullen at gmail.com>
>Subject: [Bf-funboard] Re: Some skinning feature ideas
>To: bf-funboard at projects.blender.org
>Message-ID:
>	<acf787ea0704030015t68f0f82dkf1de2fe9d622fe70 at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>  
>
>>* Introduce a Weight Paint view-mode toggle to switch between viewing
>>the weights of the selected bone and viewing the weights of the whole
>>armature.
>>    
>>

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