[Bf-funboard] Re: Some skinning feature ideas

[Tony Mullen]

 > 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.

Yes.  The point is (as you know) that a single bone's 0-1 value has no
objective meaning.  It only has meaning insofar as it is compared with
other weights active on the vertex.  When you paint a vertex at 1,
what you're actually saying is "Adjust all influences such that this
bone's influence is the same as that of all other 1-weighted bones".
Which is the same as saying that the weight is only meaningful in its
normalized form.  Folks may like the feeling they get seeing pure red
when they paint 1, but the pure red doesn't mean anything at all in
terms of how the bone affects the vert.

>I agree with you guys on that it would
> be more intuitive if painting 0.5 would make the mesh to deform
> halfways.

This might well be useful, but I should clarify that this would not be
a direct result of the suggestions I've made so far.  It seems to me
that this would require the extra step of adding a default weight of
one in favor of non-deformation.  I don't know how simple or complex
this would make things (although it seems simple enough).  If
visualizing this was necessary, it seems logical that the default
weight paint color with no bones selected would be red in this case...
but I imagine that the conservatives in here would have a cow if
anybody suggested such a drastic cosmetic change.  It may not be
necessary to visualize this at all, since the difference in behavior
would be intuitive I think.  I doubt casual users would even notice
(or comprehend) the difference.

> 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

Please see my response to Bassam's comments earlier.