Intermediate Modding Tutorial III - Blender Weight Painting Help

[itsmechiie7]

WEIGHT PAINTING TIPS & TRICKS

Today I’m going to try and help you with the most common Blender Weight Painting disasters.

How Do I move around Blender?

You need 3 things only: your mouse wheel and the right shift on your keyboard

• Mouse wheel: keeping the mouse wheel clicked will allow you to turn around

  

• Shift: Shift + Wheel will allow you to move up-down and left-right.

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• Right click: (while inside Weight Painting Mode) when you are weight painting it will prompt a menu to change the weight and the radius of your mouse/paintbrush

  

Now, some terms and some places you are going to need to click:

• Paint Skin Weights: Bottom left of the inzoi plugin for blender, this will allow us to “see” the areas and heaviness of the weight painting, and modify them. If you stop seeing the weight or are not able to modify anymore, just open the inzoi plugin pannel and click on it again. You won’t see the “vertex groups” until you click here.

• Vertex Groups: You access them by clicking “Data, ObjectData Properties” or the inverted triangle symbol. Here is where the weight has attached, it refers to part of the bodies so we will be clicking throught them to fix the messes.

• Brush: On the 2nd top line pannel of Blender, you can open the dropdown and choose between:

  • Add: to add more weight.
  • Substract: to delete weight.
  • Ignore the existence of the rest

• Timeline: This line here, you can move it right and left to move your avatar so you can better see how the clothes behave with the weights assigned.

Disaster Report: Common “messes” and how to fix them

Tiny Tips

In order to delete and add weight to an area, try to click the very edge/border/vertex of that area. Also, you can scroll until inside of your zoi and move around from inside if you can’t reach one of those vertex/”pointy parts”.

1. First “Disaster”: Armpits to the Sky

How it looks:

Culprits (USUAL SUSPECTS):

Specially (and this almost always applies) anyone that is called X_tistCor_0x. These are the enemies, to an extent

Substract from here:

• Upperarm_twistCor_01_l (or Upperarm_twistCor_01_r for the right side)
• Upperarm_twistCor_02_l (or Upperarm_twistCor_02_r for the right side)
• Upperarm_tricep_l (or Upperarm_tricep_r for the right side)
• Upperarm_bicep_l (or Upperarm_bicep_r for the right side)

Add here:

Once you have deleted from the usual suspects, let’s add to both the spine_04 and the spine_04_latissimus_l (or Spine_04_latissimus_r for the other side) NOTE: The more weight you add, the redder it it will look, that is perfectly fine. In this case Red is Good.

Now, it will look more like this:

2. Second “Disaster”: Reaching Fingers

How it looks

Culprits (USUAL SUSPECTS):

The ever-troublesome thumb_01_l or thumb_01_r

Substract from here:

• thumb_01_l (or thumb_01_r for the right side*)***

Add here:

• Wrist_inner_l (or wrist_inner_r for the right side)

Now, it will look more like this:

3. Third “Disaster”: Crossroads Crotch

How it looks

Culprits (USUAL SUSPECTS):

Thigh_twistCor_01_l (or Thigh_twistCor_01_r for the right side)

Thigh_twistCor_02_l (or Thigh_twistCor_02_r for the right side)

thigh_in_l (or thigh_in_r for the right side)

In this case, you will have to substract from the vertex above and add to the same in this manner:

• To “fix” the right side substract from the left side Thigh_twistCor_01 / Thigh_twistCor_02 & thigh_in_l and add to the Thigh_twistCor_01_r / Thigh_twistCor_02_r & thigh_in_r vertex groups.

• To “fix” the left side substract from the right side Thigh_twistCor_01_r / Thigh_twistCor_02_r & thigh_in_r and add to the Thigh_twistCor_01 / Thigh_twistCor_02 & thigh_in_l vertex groups.

Last: WHY DO MY DRESSES BREAK?

The most common problem when creating dresses and skirt for our zois is that once the zoi starts moving, the dress inevitably breaks in two. If this happens: don’t despair!

Your weight painting looks like this?

That is the issue here! Avoid harsh lines at all cost by slightly painting weight in each vertex of one side towards the other side, till they look somewhat like this:

Using the “smooth weights” too on the top left of Blender can also help, but be very careful because sometimes it can create openings in your dress’ seams.

And most importantly:

.