Hi,

I'm having problems with capturing weights.

Has anyone got any tips for painting capture weights. I've never really done it before. Its so hard! I used the regions to get it overall. Now I'm tweaking with the painting tool. ( This is the way everyone else does it right? )

Thanks

Exactly what sort of problems are you having?

The best way to do it is to edit yor capture regions and make sure they entirely encompass the geometry and make the regios overlap each other. YOu can actually get a very good capture that needs only minor tweaking based on the capture alone. You can hit W while looking at your capture regions to see your capture regions as solids. It makes it much easier to see if any geometry is poling through.

For painting, I'd recommend using a Wacom, because the paint capture tool is pressure sensitive. If your problem is that the paint tool is slow, you can set visibility flags on all but the section of the geometry you want to work with and that can speed things up a bit.

Also, you can right click on selected points and use the geometry spreadsheet. You can rapidly set weights for groups of points to specific bones withing the geometry spreadsheet.

Thanks Micheal,

I like the overlapping regions idea, and I wasnt aware of the spreadsheet.

It'd be nice to give a model a high-res “coat” for painting weights which could be averaged and burnt onto the lower res model.

Anyway

Cheers

Well it just so happens Houdini has such a feature. Brand new in 6.1 the attribute transfer SOP. Take a look in the user guide under what's new->character. There's a tutorial in there that transfers weights from something highres to something lower, but you can go low res to high if you like.

I should add about the spreadsheet.. In OBJ enter Edit Capture Weights state, select some points, then click the spreadsheet button at the top of your viewer. You can see it shows the selected points with the bone names in the top row, and they are color coded. If you click on one of the bone names it will select all the fields in that column and you can change them all at once. It's very handy if you have a group of points you want to completely excluded or completely include with a specific bone.

you can speed things up by using the visibility sop to hide the geometry that you are not painting on , also you can put a group into the paint sop…
the deform that you are viewing can also slow things down…try temporarily turing off Deform Normals and Delete Capture Attributes on the deform
…oh and I think it's Shift + W to show the capture pills as solids

a couple things i will mention about the spreadsheet and painting weights:

in the spreadsheet, if a single point has multiple weights on it from multiple bones, the weights should total 1.

also, if you are painting for one bone and then another (lets say orange and blue for this example).. and you are wanting to get rid of the blue weights in an area, but instead of painting the model back to white (non-weighted), it is turning to orange. That is because it is normalizing the weights (i.e. making sure it all equals 1. when blue goes down, orange goes up.). This can get annoying at times while painting so while in the paint capture weights op, hit p for parameters. go to op dialog page and turn off normalize weights..sometimes you may want this tho.

talkien and edward really helped me out a lot on these issues back in this thread:

http://www.sidefx.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1888&highlight= [sidefx.com]


dave