Weight Map Drift

knuckledusterharris_b01188de76

There is a part of weight mapping that I'm apparently not understanding. Sometimes a map I've already made changes after I've made another map.

For instance, I just created maps for all the joints in a hand. Each segment of each figure was filled with red and smoothed over each knuckle onto the next joint segment. The bending worked nicely, everything was cool. I copied the map from z to x and y. Everything still looked good. I cleared all selections. So far so good. I went to the next finger and did the same. After finishing the next finger, the previous finger's maps were completely bonkers--all over the place.

This doesn't always happen--I've managed to get an entire figure mapped, and although I have to clean up maps here and there, it's worked pretty well. Other times, it seems like the work I do on a map for one joint changes the map for another joint.

What am I doing wrong?

Richard Haseltine

If you are using some of the tools you need to remember that they don't just affect selected polygons. Also remember that maps are normalised, the values at any point must add up to 1 for each axis of rotation, so painting in one joint can strip values from another.

knuckledusterharris_b01188de76

I thought it might be something like that. If you delete a map and add a new one in its place, do the other maps recalculate and get thrown out of whack (for instance, an old map requires lots of erasing and rework, so you remove it and add a new one in its place)?

knuckledusterharris_b01188de76

By the way, many thanks for all the help you've given me; I've seen your name more than once on these posts, and there have been many times that you bailed me out from being completely stuck!

Richard Haseltine

Thank you.

In general, if you remove weight from a map the "freed" weight goes down the hierarchy towards the root, I expect (but haven't checked) that outright deleting a map does the same.