[Bf-funboard] Re: Re: Some skinning feature ideas

[Claudio "malefico" Andaur]

Hey guys,

>> When one first starts painting 
weights, you would expect that painting "full bright" (i.e. weight 1.0) 
would mean that the selected bone/influence is going to fully affect the 
painted area
>>


When I started working with weight paint I also found very disturbing 
that painting 0.5 weight was actually 1.0  when there were no other 
bones acting on that mesh area. I agree with you guys on that it would 
be more intuitive if painting 0.5 would make the mesh to deform 
halfways. Or keeping it as it is now in the deformation department, and 
changing to/adding a "Normal View" or something for the visualisation 
department as Tony described might be a good idea.

>>
To be honest, I 
cannot see how having a weight of 0.004 is going to help something.
>>


Well, currently if you have other modifiers than an armature (let's say 
a lattice), there are times that you need to set a 0.001 value for the 
global armature, for just the mesh not to be left behind, if you set it 
to zero, then no matter how high the weight is for the lattice, it will 
be left behind. So, there ARE cases when you want this kind of light 
weight in a vertex group.

In the other way, when Tony talks about cleaning weights... yeah... it's 
a pain. I have had lot better results using an envelope script 
(Campbell's ?) that used proxy geometry than Blender's envelopes.

Anyway, my personal opinion is that yeah, if you have  a way to make 
skinning faster, go ahead ! however, do you really think so ?  have you 
tried aaaalll the current features ? (I'm not saying you haven't, it's a 
QUESTION)  we just need to be sure to have a nice design that considers 
all real cases. And don't feel offended in any way this is not a 
personal thing.

Regards

malefico