Weight tool oddness

[LucentDreams]

Hi all - hope someone can help.

A bunch of issues using the weight tool:

1) I'm trying to use symmetry, in 'name' mode. When I drag the name of one joint into the 'Left' box, it immediately pops into the right box. If I try to drag a joint into the 'Right' box it populates the 'Left' box first, then jumps into the right. If I manually delete the text and type in the right joint names it seems to work.

2) Painting weights, in abs mode, seems broken. If I set a value of "100%" and use the weight tool in abs mode it seems to remove weight from vertices almost at random - it seems fond of '29.1%' weight for some reason. I've turned 'normalise' off, this has no affect. This makes painting weights exactly 50%, say, almost impossible. I have to set the mode to 'add', weight at 2% and then 'dab' at the verts until it gets close to 50.

3) Painting weights, in add mode, seems broken. If I set a value of 50% then touch a vert, it's weight jumps to somewhere between 50-100%. Again, the only way I can find of getting an exact value is setting the mode to 'add', strength 2% and painting over each vert over and over again...

There's more, but this should do for now! Auto-weighting works nicely though ;)

Hope someone has some advice, it's pretty irritating.

Cheers - Chris

Your mistake for both 2 and 3 is your brush type. Your using a brush falloff probably the default hardness mode right? Think about how that works at the center of the brush it is 100% but at the outer edge it is 0% so in absolute mode when the outer edges are touching a vert you are painting a low percentage overwriting your previous weight with a low weight. For add mode your adding small percentages at the edges and large percentages at the center. this is thew trouble with any falloffs. Personally when weight painting unless I'm smoothing I avoid usually avoid falloffs and when painting absolute I ALWAYS use NONE because absolute painting and falloffs just don't make sense.

I have a Cineversity script set that are ideal brush presets that should be up before Christmas, the scripts are done I just have to make the video for them.


As for the Names symmetry options, well it should populate both sides with the exact same name, cinema can't be intelligent enough to know your naming convention from my naming convention so you either type from scratch in both, or you drag one side, and then correct the name on the other side.

[ChrisCousins]

Your mistake for both 2 and 3 is your brush type.

Spot on - just tried this, it worked a treat. Thanks for the pointers!

I have a Cineversity script set that are ideal brush presets that should be up before Christmas, the scripts are done I just have to make the video for them.

Good stuff.

As for the Names symmetry options, well it should populate both sides with the exact same name, cinema can't be intelligent enough to know your naming convention

Yup, this was due to my misunderstanding the way this worked. The otherwise excellent Wipix DVD is a bit sketchy on weighting, which is a shame as it's not always obvious how it should be done... thanks again - Chris

[kattkieru]

As someone who wrestled with this same issue earlier today for a while before a friend linked me to this page, my thanks go to you, Kai, for this tip. I couldn't tell why Abs was broken either.

I have a Cineversity script set that are ideal brush presets that should be up before Christmas, the scripts are done I just have to make the video for them.

Did those ever go up? I searched for weight stuff on Cineversity, but didn't see anything that looked like what you're referring to. (Also, are those scripts in the free area? I don't have a spare $400 at the mo. ^_^; )

[LucentDreams]

Ack, no they didn't I forgot about those while working on two other cineversity series. I'm currently doing th adobe power integration tour on the west coast, I get home on the fifth so I'll post here when I get them up on the 6th. Thanks for asking again about these.

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