Ikas Blender 3D ( 6 - Weight paint )


Page PrécédenteIntroduction - Armature and Mesh - First animation - A little more - Constraints - Weight -Various tricks

Weight painting: This process makes it possible to modify the ' Weight' value of the entire or part of a group. Before using this feature, it is necessary to know:

1-It is only active on vertices already assigned to a group.
2-A vertex not already assigned to a group, may be assigned to one or more other existing groups.
3-If the selection of vertices seems particularly troublesome to you, try restarting Blender without using the '3D acceleration' mode of your system, this may occur in systems with graphic cards that do not properly support openGL. (Updating your graphics card driver may help, as well).
4-Create a copy of your .blend file before using weight paint. Either due to a bug or a mistake on my part, this option 'crashed' once during my tests and the current file became completely inoperative even after restarting and reloading the file.
Keeping the above points in mind, load the ( tut-ika-01.zip file ) file for the following. Configure your work screen as indicated in the previous chapter, you should not be in edit mode, otherwise it will not work, and in the 'edit buttons' window select the group 'B2' with the little white dash '-' button below the text 'Group'.
Carefully lock up the dog before clicking on the button which represents a bone: ( No keyboard shortcut key? ) which appears in the menu bar, only if the selected object is parented with an armature. You should see something similiar to that shown below.


In the preceding image, you'll notice that the selected group ( B2 ) is displayed in red. The color corresponds to the value of the 'weight' which is assigned to the vertices that are in the active group. To assure yourself of this fact, enter the value 0.5 in the 'weight' box of the 'edit buttons' window and with the cursor, smear the central part of B2 to obtain the visible result that appears, as is shown in the opposite image. Thus, it is the color which makes it possible to locate with regards to the value of the 'weight' associated to your vertices. The two extremes are: Blue=0, Red=1, the intermediate colors are ( in ascending order ) green->yellow->orange.


Continue in the same spirit by smearing the right end of the object and you will see this. Quit 'Weight Paint' mode by clicking on the button which represents a 'bone', switch to 'edit' mode ( Tab ) and click on the button 'Select' in the group's options to see that the vertices which you swept with the weight paint were included in the group during the course of selection. ( This will not work if the vertices do not belong to any groups of the armature ).

You can also work in face mode as is done for UV-Mapping. Press 'F' and the buttons should have this appearance:

Note: It is possible that the weight paint function may become completely inoperative for a given file, a quick toggle of the normal 'paint' mode ( The left-most button in the group of 4 ) solves the problem in a large majority of cases.
In the 'vertex paint' window, it is the cursor 'size' ( brush diameter adjustment ) which will be of most use to you. The cursor 'opacity' has an influence on the result, but is redundant with the value given to ' weight '. My opinion: Set it to 1 and forget about it. In theory, the two buttons 'Area' and 'Soft' must remain inserted, but you can always have fun to see the results obtained by modifying their state. However, it is while playing with 'area', 'soft' and 'normal' that i sometimes get a 'crash' ( With version 2.20 dynamic, OS: linux Mandrake 8.0, closing Blender following a segmentation error ) which makes the function inoperative after restarting.
In case you make an error while weight painting, pressing the 'U' key cancels the last painting operation performed.
The other buttons and cursor controls do not appear to be useful with this feature.