Shapes and painting weights

#1

Hi,
I have a model rigged and ready for skinning.But I have a problem.My model’s shape is not a whole thing but many smaller shapes correctly placed to be seen as a model.First time I skinned it and tried to paint weights having used the hipSway to the right I noticed many places where it was apparent that the body wasn’t one shape but many shapes next to each other.There were voids where the shapes had gone apart.I thought it could be fixed by painting the weights but that was not the case.Do I have to combine those shapes into one to be able to paint it’s weights without the components leaving voids between them?

thx

#2

Hi,
I think its possible to do without combining shapes into one by using lattices and rigid binding. I think this allows to kind of smooth out the weights across a lattice that represents a whole shape. I’m no expert in skinning, but here are a couple of ideas.

To keep the pieces separate make a lattice around pieces and rigid bind lattice to joints. If its deforming okay you could stop here or maybe could add a joint cluster flexor also may need to tweak the lattice divisions. This joint cluster flexor does some weighting on the lattice points and it can be tweaked.

Another Idea. If its okay to merge pieces into one, mesh combine pieces into one shape and smooth bind with possibly max influences of two.

Here are a couple of examples I made that may be helpful .

Regards,
Nate

Inspired by Alex Alvarez (alexalvarez dot com)

#3

First of all thx for the reply…
I have no idea what lattices are but i need to use smooth bind since it’s better for organic models.

Something I forgot to mention above which might have an impact on the solutions that are suggested to me…I need to make feature points according to a standard I’m focusing my model on(also there are many joints to this model on account of the standard,which is the h-anim standard).You probably won’t understand what these are with that term.I’ve seen these though in a video on youtube being refered to as riveted “on face” controls.Basically joints which are controlling skin clusters and changing the geometry directly.I don’t know maybe this can be done with standard controls instead of joints but that doesn’t matter.I need to create these controls all over the body and face.

So far I’ve started painting weights with the usual smooth bind but i’m using 5 influences.I used 5 since I have a joint chain resembling the actual body joints.However it’s hell since the different geometry parts even if they are combined they still dislodge when the weights aren’t good.So I’ll definitely try testing your suggestion of 2 influences and see how it goes.

PS:bear in mind i’m a complete novice,but i need this for my bachelor’s thesis.don’t ask how it came to that:P

#4

ok…tried a bit of everything in smooth binding.different number of influences ,interactive and post normalized weights…but it ain’t going good for me,well it is the first time I’m painting weights ever so kind of expected.

the problem is that even if i combine the shapes into one(and deleting history for the transform info to go away) they still dislodge at the points where they were divided at first.i think that if i could solve this one first it would be a big help.

on another note,is the easiest way to use influence objects to keep the volume??for every different set of settings i used apart from the dislodging i couldn’t get the right volume in the hip and thigh.

another thing i forgot to say is that the model is high poly.it has nearly 125000 tris.would it be better to reduce the count?i saw a tutorial on painting weights on youtube where the model was low poly but with good detail and the guy doing the video was saying how you should always use add weight and with the value of 1 only and not use smooth replace and scale.
though others might disagree the end result he showed was very good but i keep thinking it was the poly count that mattered.in a model like mine that would be very difficult.

also should i make a duplicate ,reduce the poly count and use skin wrap or sth like that?would that be easier?(again youtube tutorial)

#5

problem…turns out i need to merge the vertices of those parts that i combined.and it seems it’s the reason they keep getting dislodged when i paint the weights.but when i try to merge after combining shapes(even if i try only two parts instead of the whole thing at once) i get warning that the polymergevert cannot be evaluated properly and a message box saying it can’t be saved in a temporary ascii file.

#6

unfortunately i have to fix the in betweens.and that means merging the vertices where the parts join.if anyone has info on how to do this efficiently it would help a lot.

EDIT:i combined the left calf with the left ankle area and merged the vertices that connect them but no luck…they still disconnected when i painted for the ankle and put weight of 1 near the ankle.

and maybe this is the problem,weird stray vertices that i can’t select which sit underneath the vertices of the part(i just took the vertices of the part and moved them down a bit and then i saw those vertices):

I’m using a free model for my bachelor’s thesis project.being a newbie i didn’t think to check it first for things like this.

#7

found out a solution:

go to polygons menu.
shift select all geometry that will be one in the end and go to display->polygons->border edges.
i then proceed to do the work two parts of adjoining geometry at a time where i first combine them,go to component mode,shift select all vertices on the border edges and go to EditMesh->Merge[](with a 0.001 or 0.0001 value of threshold).If the border edges are completely gone it means the merging was successful and i can go back to object mode and delete the history for the transforms unites and merges etc to be final.
If there are any border edges left,then simply go to component mode again and select the vertices of those edges and merge then one by one with a very low value of threshold until they all disappear and again go back to object mode and delete history.

that way all the common/overlapping and stray vertices are gone and the merging is successful so much so that doing the weight painting and using extreme values to dislodge the formerly adjoining parts doesn’t create crevasses in the geometry like before.

#8

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