Weight Map Locking
Stretch65
Posts: 167
Hi,
I've been learning how to rig figures and paint triax weight maps. There's a problem which I can't seem to solve. As I understand it, weight maps can be overlapping, can't they? It's just that when I paint a map for a bone, and then paint another map for a bone that's either above or below the previous bone, I'm finding that my first map is being erased by the second map in areas where the 2 maps overlap.
Now, I've already tried locking each map before I paint the next map, but it doesn't seem to be working. In some cases it's really obvious - a map that I was previously quite happy with has suddenly been obliterated by some other painting that I've done. Sometimes the problem is quite subtle - a map that worked quite nicely is now behaving rather poorly, and on closer inspection I can see that weight in a few vertices has changed but not necessarily been erased altogether.
Is there something I'm not understanding about this whole process? Does locking even work? Because at the moment I'm finding it quite demoralizing. I'm beginning to think that it would be easier to just create ghost bones and parent a bunch of deformers to each of them - I know that's not as user-friendly but at least I know that works.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Weight are set to auto-normalise by default, that means the total weight on a vertex (for any givena xis if using TriAx) will always be 1, adding weight to one bone removes it from others. You can turn normalisation off, in the Tool Settings pane, but if the weights add up to more than 1 the results may be unexpected and undesirable (and you almost certainly don't want it for skeletal bones, it's more useful for handles used for posing things like skirts).
Ok. Well I'm rigging a handbag, so maybe if I turn normalization off?
Yeah, I admit it - I'm into handbags :)
What are you wanting to do? If the handbagis a child of the hand then it will move with the hand even if you weight the bag itself to 1. Of course that would probably end up with the bag as a child of the handles.