[Weight Painting] There must be an easier way to weight paint

[ArctixSnowPup]

I am recreating a model from the workshop to be able to used with HL2 models. I will not upload this for public use until I get full permission to do so.

The models in question are some of the clothing from the Splatoon Clothing Pack.
I followed along with PTEJack's bone creation/weight paint tutorial (7 and 8).

What I am doing is manually selecting each face to be then applied to a certain vertex (ValveBiped.Bip01_R_Hand for example.

screenshots: (More will be added as needed) https://imgur.com/a/wgN9Xg8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0bLr5zEB54

[episoder]

well... this part you highlighted should be "painted" with a mix of upper arm and the clavicle. i dunno what else to tell there. just add some more clavicle weight. and...

maybe you should consider really painting and smoothing the weights rather then bruteforcing it with the "apply weight" methods. it's a bit of a tedious job to get good results, but you get nice results with a bit of practice. yes...

you gotta try out and practice this. there's no general rule how to do it.

also setting 0.5 upper arm weight, when there's no other weight/bone involved, screws this up cause it rounds the arm weights to 1.0. hence why it looks "broken".

just add the clavicle weights and smooth it and it should be fine.

[ArctixSnowPup]

İlk olarak episoder tarafından gönderildi:

well... this part you highlighted should be "painted" with a mix of upper arm and the clavicle. i dunno what else to tell there. just add some more clavicle weight. and...

That was just an example. I just kinda highlighted random stuff. I thought maybe I could use the weight painting "brush". What do you mean by not brute forcing? Is there a way I could use the brush?

İlk olarak episoder tarafından gönderildi:

also setting 0.5 upper arm weight, when there's no other weight/bone involved, screws this up cause it rounds the arm weights to 1.0. hence why it looks "broken".

just add the clavicle weights and smooth it and it should be fine.

I was about to finish the model, I just thought... "damn. This can't be the way to do it". The shoulders are the hardest part. What do I want to select?

[Pte Jack]

Weight painting is probably one of the hardest parts of modeling. There is no right or wrong way to do it, but the model has to deform naturally when finished. Here you have faces selected and your painting by what I call the brute force method (using the vertex group tool to assign absolute values (the slider) of one bone to all the vertexes in that selection).

https://i.imgur.com/fbNI107.png

The shoulder area is difficult to weight paint and you should be doing it in weight paint mode because the vertexes contain a blending of bone influences. However, vertexes can only be influenced by up to 3 bones in a Valve model or it won't compile and the total value of the influences can only be 1 (for example a vertex might have values like upper spine .25. clavicle .50, upper arm .25 = 1)

This particular model is influenced by 6 bones in some places, but that can be limited to 3 (highest bone influences) in Weight paint mode Options OR dialed out using the Weight Link Cull Threshold slider when exporting DMX files.

https://i.imgur.com/SbYwSpm.gif

Using automatic weight culling to 3 influences can severely break the compiled model, it has to be checked thoroughly after being compiled to look for unnatural deforms.

https://i.imgur.com/SbYwSpm.gif

Is is always best to try and limit the number of influences manually using weight paint options by selecting a group of Vertexes In weigh paint mode, selecting a vertex group, setting the Weight and Strength setting of a brush and painting them. If they need to be influenced by multiple bone, then you select the next vertex group you want to paint, set the brush value and paint over top of the selected vertexes.

This is the same model after adjusting the weight painting and here, no vertex is influenced by more that 3 bones.

https://i.imgur.com/dxvWBnC.gif

Weight Paint Brush tools are located in the Transform Tools menu under the Tools Tab in Weight Paint Mode. Vertex and Face select modes are still in the same place under the upper menu beside the mode menu.

https://i.imgur.com/yQkpV6y.png

Here you can see that if the vertexes are weighted properly (even with only up to 3 bone influences per vertex) a model like this will properly deform.

https://i.imgur.com/HbG9idZ.png

It's just a matter of trail and error and practice to weight paint stuff like this.

[ArctixSnowPup]

İlk olarak Pte Jack tarafından gönderildi:

Weight painting is probably one of the hardest parts of modeling. There is no right or wrong way to do it, but the model has to deform naturally when finished. Here you have faces selected and your painting by what I call the brute force method (using the vertex group tool to assign absolute values (the slider) of one bone to all the vertexes in that selection).

https://i.imgur.com/fbNI107.png

The shoulder area is difficult to weight paint and you should be doing it in weight paint mode because the vertexes contain a blending of bone influences. However, vertexes can only be influenced by up to 3 bones in a Valve model or it won't compile and the total value of the influences can only be 1 (for example a vertex might have values like upper spine .25. clavicle .50, upper arm .25 = 1)

This particular model is influenced by 6 bones in some places, but that can be limited to 3 (highest bone influences) in Weight paint mode Options OR dialed out using the Weight Link Cull Threshold slider when exporting DMX files.

https://i.imgur.com/SbYwSpm.gif

Using automatic weight culling to 3 influences can severely break the compiled model, it has to be checked thoroughly after being compiled to look for unnatural deforms.

https://i.imgur.com/SbYwSpm.gif

Is is always best to try and limit the number of influences manually using weight paint options by selecting a group of Vertexes In weigh paint mode, selecting a vertex group, setting the Weight and Strength setting of a brush and painting them. If they need to be influenced by multiple bone, then you select the next vertex group you want to paint, set the brush value and paint over top of the selected vertexes.

This is the same model after adjusting the weight painting and here, no vertex is influenced by more that 3 bones.

https://i.imgur.com/dxvWBnC.gif

Weight Paint Brush tools are located in the Transform Tools menu under the Tools Tab in Weight Paint Mode. Vertex and Face select modes are still in the same place under the upper menu beside the mode menu.

https://i.imgur.com/yQkpV6y.png

Here you can see that if the vertexes are weighted properly (even with only up to 3 bone influences per vertex) a model like this will properly deform.

https://i.imgur.com/HbG9idZ.png

It's just a matter of trail and error and practice to weight paint stuff like this.

This is absolutely very helpful. Thank you so much, again! I really want to learn how to weight paint better and this is very thorough!