[Tutorial] Automatic Armature Weight Painting/Vertex Groups

[forthfriend]

Hello!

This is a short tutorial on a really useful and time saving technique that illuminates the need to weight paint, as the feature does it automatically.

Tutorial:

Alright! To begin this tutorial, you need a basic knowledge of blender, some sort of mesh (object), and an armature. If you don't know how to build a armature, follow the following tutorial. STOP WHEN YOU GET TO THE WEIGHT PAINTING, AND COME BACK HERE! For that tutorial, go here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation.

Okay! Let's start!

Go into Object Mode:

Go Into Object Mode

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Select your mesh (deselect all other objects, INCLUDING THE ARMATURE):

Select Your Mesh

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Now Shift+Select the armature, making sure that it too is in object mode, not pose mode.

Shift+Select The Armature

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Press Ctrl+P and select armature from the pop-up menu:

Press Ctrl+P and Select Armature

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Another Pop-Up Menu will appear, asking you if you want to "Create Vertex Groups?". Select Create From Bone Heat:

Select Create From Bone Heat

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Walla! It automatically just weight painted your mesh for you! Now we select the armature and go into Pose Mode:

Go Into Pose Mode

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Move a bone and the mesh will follow! Sometimes Bone Heat doesn't weight paint your mesh completely, which I will cover in the next step:

Move A Bone!

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Now the deer's antlers and eyes were not weight painted by the bone heat parent thing, so we need to manually paint them, a semi-painless operation. Make sure that the effected bone is selected. Select the mesh and go into weight paint.

Go Into Weight Paint
Go Into Weight Paint

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Now Paint the non-painted objects! Make sure that weight is set to one, and opacity is also set to 1. To get the Weight Paint Properties, press the N key. What you weight paint should snap into position when you paint them.

The Fixed Weight Paint

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Now go back to object mode, select the armature and make sure you're in Pose Mode. Move some bones and watch your mesh move with them! (You can press G to free-move anything in blender, in this case the bone.):

The Finished Armature

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If everything is good, you can click "Make Real" in the edit buttons, which will add a armature modifier. Only do this after you have finished tweeking the armature completely!:

Make The Armature Parent Real

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So there you have it! A complete armature! One more tip: when animating and moving the mesh, move the armature instead, or else the armature will be left behind...

I hope this tutorial will be helpful to you! The technique saved me a lot of time while rigging this deer for a project.

Thanks!

Forthfriend

[forthfriend]

P.S.:

If you have any problems, feel free to PM me.

Forthfriend

[Penumbra]

Thx for the tutorial, but when doing a tutorial you should have the people doing it have the same rig/character as yourself because you recieve different results. The bone heat feature has only worked once for me and i have no idea why it will not work anymore. I used it on rigging my latest character in my hacky sack animation. But i opened up my previously made/riged character from that text tutorial and un parented the bones and body. Then tried to do it with bone heating and it becomes a huge mess... not sure why . But on all of my characters, i can't seem to get bone heating to work right again.

[forthfriend]

Thx for the tutorial, but when doing a tutorial you should have the people doing it have the same rig/character as yourself because you recieve different results. The bone heat feature has only worked once for me and i have no idea why it will not work anymore. I used it on rigging my latest character in my hacky sack animation. But i opened up my previously made/riged character from that text tutorial and un parented the bones and body. Then tried to do it with bone heating and it becomes a huge mess... not sure why . But on all of my characters, i can't seem to get bone heating to work right again.

That's strange... Maybe you should just select the mesh and do Clear Parent from the object menu on it, make all modifier's real... Try deleting all vertex groups before you do bone heat.

Send me over the .blend file and I'll take a look.

Forthfriend

[Penumbra]

I have no idea why it wont work... .
I did all that you said and it still didnt work. So here's the file with the rig set up on bone heat. You can see what happens when you move it.

I have him rigged up manually aswell in another file, but obviously that is time consuming to do lol. So i'd be more than happy if someone could figure out why bone heat isn't working for me.

boneheatrigproblem.blend

(498.62 KiB) Downloaded 213 times

[forthfriend]

I have no idea why it wont work... .
I did all that you said and it still didnt work. So here's the file with the rig set up on bone heat. You can see what happens when you move it.

I have him rigged up manually aswell in another file, but obviously that is time consuming to do lol. So i'd be more than happy if someone could figure out why bone heat isn't working for me.

boneheatrigproblem.blend

I've downloaded your file and will look at it and get back to you sometime today. Thanks for giving it to us to look at, and I hope I find a solution!

Forthfriend

[Penumbra]

hey no problem man, thank you for takin your time to try and help

[forthfriend]

Well! I fixed it by... Sorta redoing your armature. The structure of armature you were using isn't the type that Bone Heat likes... . I made all of his limbs and stuff work, but you still need to tweek a couple of things and parent/connect etc the eyes. I hope this helps!

Use the tweeking part of the tutorial on some limbs if you need to.

Here is the finished file:

boneheatrigproblem_solved.blend

Solved...

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Hope this helps!

Forthfriend

[Penumbra]

I appreciate you takin the time to look at it, but it's still not fixed lol
If you grab one of his arms and try to bring it down to his side, you'll see what i mean.

[forthfriend]

I appreciate you takin the time to look at it, but it's still not fixed lol
If you grab one of his arms and try to bring it down to his side, you'll see what i mean.

Well... I looked at it again, but for some reason Bone Heat was not painting anything having to do with the spine. I think that something about the structure of your characters is.. well... baffling blender lol. I think you should just use it to get you started, and then continue manually from there. Also, I recommend that you post at the blender,org forums, because a lot of developers go there to post.


Forthfriend