Being able to easily select and divide up edge loops and rings manually allows me the greatest ability to create more natural shapes while maintaining clean edge-flow. Maintaining a low poly-count to start with is very helpful in reducing additional work when it comes to correcting delicate bone weights, but it’s also in these cases where adding intervening geometry is appropriate, and this is why, despite having used a Subsurface division modifier to visualize, I have not applied such modifiers permanently to my mesh.
It’s at this stage that I have added more geometry to critical areas, such as joints and the tail. This is also a great opportunity to smooth out weights along Adding geometry judiciously at this stage is a good way of adding a more natural look. Whereas you can (for the most part) assign heavy influence of a rigid mass to a single bone, rigging to ensure smooth movement along a curvy mass often requires more of a gradiated transition – sometimes extending well past the immediate location of the bone.įor example, you could weight mesh along a tail rigidly, but when it comes time to move it, the mesh will be overly faceted and easily visible from afar as being unnatural. Understanding a lot of this comes with experience & experimentation. Don’t be discouraged if this doesn’t work out right away. I’ve always found this to be the case – coming to a happy medium between influence from multiple bones in a soft mass is a very organic process that depends heavily upon an understanding of what you want to move, and where. The weighting process with the cute, fuzzy and not-at-all skinny corgi has been, inevitably, a bit different (and long-winded) compared to weighting the sleek & non-squishy Drider avatar covered not too long ago. There are pros and cons to using each of these methods and almost 100% of the time, I use the second method *after* having used the first, in order to make it look more natural. It allows you to use a digital brush to add, subtract, draw, lighten, darken, blur or otherwise affect bone influence, which in this mode is represented by a gradient of colour, ranging from blue (no influence) to yellow(middling influence) to red (full influence). Vertices associated with a given bone can also be selected or deselected in this same menu.ī) Weight Painting – This is a weighting method which allows you to visualize the degree to which verts are weighted to a particular bone through the use of colour. Once this is done, the mesh can be weighted using the first, second or both of the following methods:Ī) Assignment as an Edit Mode property – by selecting a single vertex or a whole group of them in Edit mode, you can affect their bone weighting by choosing the (above) indicated menu in the Edit properties tab, adjusting the associated weight and then hitting either ‘Apply’ or ‘Remove’.
This can either be done by choosing ‘With Empty Groups’ from the Armature Deform menu (which we got to by selecting the mesh, then the armature – both in object mode – then hitting hotkeys Control + P) OR selecting the mesh and adding an Armature modifier, taking care to point the ‘Object’ field in that modifier to the appropriate armature. To accomplish either of the following two methods, the mesh needs to be parented to the armature. This is why the following two methods are also very important to learn. In any case, there will always be some degree of tweaking required afterward, so tools such as ‘Automatic Weights’ should be considered a useful tool in most cases, but not a magic bullet.
Sometimes Bone Heat works, sometimes it doesn’t. The same cannot necessarily be said for avatars that depend upon a modified skeleton (like this Corgi). It is important to note here that with human avatars, it’s usually possible to use it to predict which parts of the mesh should be associated with which bones. This brings up the ‘Armature Deform’ menu, from which ‘Automatic Weights’ should be chosen. Automatic weighting is achieved by right-clicking the mesh, THEN the armature in Object mode, then Parenting the former to the latter by selecting ‘Ctrl + P’. This is a shortcut – one which attempts to assign the mesh to the bones that are closest to that particular area on the mesh. To adequately modify weighting for the avatar, there are a few methods of particular relevance: Automatic Weights
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