Hi,

I am painting bone capture weights and a bit stuck when three or more bones affect the same point.

Basically I would like to set the weights on one bone and move on to the next. But when I work on the second bone it affects via normalization all the rest of the bones which makes it impossible to completely finalize the weights on one bone without constantly returning back.

It seems this work great with two bones because normalization of course makes total sense where the normalized weight should go, but when having three or more, the rest of the weight is distributed on bones I would like to be left alone.

Basically if I set the weight for bone A to 0.4 I would like all the other bones distribute the other 0.6 between them but not affect the bone A weight.

Is there any way to do this? Any advice on painting capture weights workflow with multiple bones affecting the same points?

Moin,

I go through a few approaches on dealing with this problem in my “leg rig” video series (have a look at my Vimeo channel - I have been told that video tutorials suck and watching them is a waste of time, so, since I don't know if you like videos, I'll leave it at that )

One way is to have polygongroups set up so that you can limit the weight distribution to only those areas that you want to be affected. That sounds tedious at first, but is actually very easy to use.
The weighting spreadsheet can be of help, too, again with some groups set up for faster access.

You could, in theory, create separate weighting “threads” and combine those in a wrangle node at the end, having access to your own normalization process, but I assume this is way too complex for a “standard” situation (it might make sense if you are talking about hundreds or even thousands of “points with issues”).

Marc

Hi Marc,

thank you for your help! I checked your videos, nice work on the spider rig and a lot of great tips there.
Polygon groups is a really good workflow idea but they don't really help with locking certain bone weight. Spreadsheet is a very good tool I use a lot in places where I want to select, flood the weights and move on. But again, no good way of weight locking.

Separate weighting threads sounds interesting and I might go that way if nothing else works especially since as you already wrote it is a bit complex solution.

It seems that currently you really have to plan out in advance how you will paint/set capture weights in tricky areas like shoulders where points can be affected by multiple bones in order to avoid constantly going back and correct weights that were already good.