Weightmapping. Again.

guilledcf

Hi!

I'm struggling to rig me an original humanoid figure in DAZ Studio, struggle being the key concept here. Got the polygon groups and the bones already, but I'm having more trouble than usual with them weightmaps. I've already checkd this thread and the official docs, but somehow my stuff dosnt seem to react as expected.

So, my figure's limbs ar actually following their respective bones, but deformations are no good. When I try to edit the weights of any given bone, I find out that said bone is "all red", and it won't let me go blue no matter how much I alt+click. I do can edit the areas surrounding that bone, but that's not good enough to fix the movement. 

   

I'm afraid I might be on some wrong weightmode (TriAx or what) or something like that; i don't really understand most of the tool's (manifold) options and parameters. Should I add any map? Do I change parameters for each bone, or rather apply them to the whole figure? What's binding? Normalized? Uh? Wot?

help plz >_<

Richard Haseltine

TriAx gives multiple maps for each bend, one per axis for bending plus one for scaling plus one for bulges. General weight mapping uses a single map. You will see both sets of maps listed for the joint, however.

Skin Binding is a matter of choice - Dual Quaternion should give "better" rsults (better at preserving the volume, as I understand it).

Normalisation should be on by default - it makes sure that the ttoal weight on a vertex, across all bones that affect the bone, is 1 - if it's allowed to be more or less than that the results can be unexpected. If normalisation is on then removing weight from a bone will add the weight to the parent bone's map instead.

Whatever option yous choose, you are likely to need to use morphs linked to bends (JCMs) to deal with at least some distortion.

guilledcf

Richard man, what would we do without you. I'll be digging (and googling) carefully your words.

As for now, i took all normalization off and was able to edit each bone. I hope it doesn't hit me back later as these things tend to do, Richard's words aint exactly comforting there.

Symmetry is no workin btw, nor was "mirror weights" last time i checked :(