Skin and Weights
polycounter
Im trying so set up the skin weights for a mainly organic character that i want to import into UT3. Its very hard for me to make some good looking deformation with it and it seems i have to weight every single vert and cant use the envlopes because they are much to imprecise.
Are there any good Tutorials?
Also annoying is that some verts are set to red (1.0) by default and i cant change there weight!?
Are there any good Tutorials?
Also annoying is that some verts are set to red (1.0) by default and i cant change there weight!?
Replies
Weight the major joints first, use a large brush on a high strength setting. Be rough.
Paint out any weights the shouldn't be there, like right thigh weights on the the characters left thigh. Remove calf weighting from the thigh, thigh from the claf etc.
You goal in the first 5 minutes is to get all the major joints moving roughly with no lingering verts.
After that, it's a just a matter of refining. Blend the weights on the outside of the joints, keep harder creases with little to no blending on the inside of joints to avoid the pipecleaner/collapsing effect.
Also annoying is that some verts are set to red (1.0) by default and i cant change there weight!?
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If a vert is only influenced by one bone, then it will always be set to 1.0 (red). Weight it to another bone and then you should be able to adjust the vert weight. It won't let you weight between one bone and nothing.
Normally a vert weight must always = 1.0 you can break that up between as many bones as you need but it must = 1. It might be easier to think of it as a percentage. The vert must always be 100% weighted to something, you can break up that percentage between bones but it is going to always = 100%. It might be 90/10, 50/50 or 10/20/70 but it will always calculate to 100%.
UE only supports 4 bones/vert. There is a setting under Advanced Parameters rollout.
It's also a good idea to set the max number of bones before adding bones to the list. Often if you change the max number of bones after adding them, it does some really screwy weighting.
Also use cross sections to tweak the shape of your envelopes before going in and hand weighting, or painting. You'll save hours of time.
I learned a lot, no need for a tutorial anymore
Also know that once you start custom weighting verts they are no longer effected by the envelopes, so if you find you want to tweak the envelope settings, you might want to reset the verts attached to that bone, found in advanced properties also, its three buttons that look like a bone, a group of verts and a poly.
You can't really apply custom skin weights the same way so it pays to take a little bit of time and set up the envelopes once, saves you time later when you rig new characters
One last tip, there are two rings for a bones envelope. Verts that fall in the inner ring are set to 100%, the outer ring is 0%, the default distance between these is normally kind of large some times it pays to shrink the outer ring as it might remove a bunch of verts you didn't want influenced by the bone, like in the legs, fingers and bicep areas.
comes in quite handy.