painting weights?

I’ve noticed in more than a couple tutorials online that using the Mix blending mode while painting weights is a bad idea. Why is that? I’m working on my first rig right now and the Mix blending mode seems like the answer to all my problems. Why can’t you just lock unwanted vertex groups and mix away?

I just don’t want to find out the hard way.

You guys seem to be a fickle lot. How is Blender going to grow as a program if there is no community?

Not sure what you’re asking exactly. Different blending modes are appropriate for different specific situations. Mix is fine if you have a target mid-range weight that you’re trying to draw various vertices toward, as it will subtract or add as necessary according to the strength of the brush and the existing vertex weight. But if you want to get a region all to 100% then add might work better.

As for locking off vertex groups, that’s an unclear way of wording it. You could mean one of two things: either you want to lock off certain vertices to make sure you don’t accidentally add them to your active vertex group. If that’s the case you can use face selection masking in Weight Paint mode to lock off what you don’t want to touch. Or you could mean you don’t want to alter other vertex groups other than the active one.

As long as you don’t have Auto-Normalize activated you can change only the active group. This is the default anyway, but be warned that you could have unintended results. Vertices can have more than 100% total weight from multiple groups, so a vertex weighted 100% in one group and 100% in another will behave as if it is 50% in both. That’s one of the things normalize is intended to address (though sometimes you will want greater than 100% weight).

Are you complaining that no one responded to your post quickly enough? Dude, it’s Saturday.

I have no life…:frowning:

Well, it took you until Sunday to respond. :stuck_out_tongue:

I blame the beer keg, I had nothing to do with the events of the previous evening :eyebrowlift2:.

I was just trying to find a good workflow for skinning. and have looked all over for a decent tutorials for it, the mix tool seemed at the moment the most useful tool yet two or three tutorials say “don’t use the mix tool!” It felt like a spook story, “Use the mix tool and your rig will haunt you.”

I think I found a useful albeit dated tutorial that seems to help me out. Once I finish this thing I’ll post it.

Duplicate Post

hmm, my last post won’t add.

Well, ok I’ll try again. I was scared/stressed because I kept running into problems the last time I attempted to rig a character. Things kept happening that I could not understand. but now I’ve got real far in the rigging process and don’t want skinning to block me again.

Through the weekend I think I discovered a decent way of painting the weights via an old video tutorial by a Omar Ramirez. It’s a dated video but it’s method still applies to a 2.7 blender. also found 2 good foot-roll tutorials that I’m not yet sure about but add an additional toe roll to the more well known rigging tutorials.

EDIT: Oh, there it is!

New users with fewer than 10 posts are held in moderation before the post is visible.

Anyway, the various blend modes all have their uses. If you were never meant to use one at all, it wouldn’t even be an option would it? I would say that perhaps whatever tutorials you were watching either A) simply meant “don’t use mix blindly all the time just because it’s the default. If you want to follow the workflow I’m showing you, you’ll have to switch to add or subtract or whatever,” or B) they suck. Lots of crap tutorials out there tell you with authority that you should never do X or always do Y. Just because some guy said it in a YouTube video doesn’t mean he knows what he’s talking about. Or C) a mix of A and B.

I think it stems from quick advice given by some to folks who didn’t know how it all works and/or how to use all the tools and were having issues with stray deforming vertices with very small values of weighting applied.

“I painted it blue and it still moves the mesh??? Help me help me!”. :slight_smile:

And of course that advice has morphed into “Never never ever use mix mode 'cos it’s bad!”

-LP

Then I need to stop taking these tutorials as written in stone. A few things I figure out on my own but for the most part I’m cutting and pasting what works best. thanks for the advice I’ll post some images as soon as I got it skinned.

yup, I kinda gets it now. With a bit of sucking in of my pride i got the rig fixed. Yeah, I rarely used the mix and blend tools. Tiny bits of influence kept going to the root joint and I’d just put them in the right spot.

Thank you for the help!