Hi,
my second post in Blender Artists forums, and first post in rigging area!
I started recently to evaluate usefulness of Blender for my current workflow.
I’ve already gone through basics of parenting, rigging, constraints, weight painting and such, and now I have some questions.
I’m quite familiar in rigging in general, but my experience is mostly limited to 3ds Max, Maya and other software.
I have to say that some features seem to be a bit too hard to find so here some questions.
I bet I’ll eventually find answer to these in either manual or by being persistent, but I bet somebody already has an answer to these questions!
Q: Can a mesh have multiple vertex groups;
- NOTE: what I mean is 15 bone character could have setA and setB.
- Why; when I finish a pass of skin weighting, I could copy full set and keep it as backup.
SOLUTION: Copy a mesh, it should keep vertex groups. But this isn’t so neat solution.
Q: Can I have multiple Armature (Skinning) modifiers on mesh using different vertex group (set)?
- Related to above, is this possible?s
Q: When adding skin modifier, is it possible to somehow exclude rigging / setup related bones?
- When I Ctrl+P mesh to armature, it adds non deform bones which I have to then manually remove from vertex groups
- This seems illogical, after all non-deform bones do not belong to skinning
Q: What command matches Ctrl+Alt+S scaling and where in UI this value resides?
- This keyboard shortcut does scaling without affecting children or length of bone, I came across this in some tutorial
- Where can I find it in UI, it must be a toggle somewhere?
- Also, it seems to apply local scaling to bone which themselves are not objects in Blender just parts of armature, so where does this scale value reside in UI? It’s not in bone properties, neither it is in “N” panel Transform area…
Q: If I’m in weight painting mode, is picking bones from armature (Ctrl+mouse click) only possible if armature is in pose mode?
- This seems to add one extra step, and drops me out of weight painting, unless I’ve done above mentioned step
Q: Is it possible to give rig object colors for easier rig “reading”?
- Same goes for wireframe color of mesh. Can Blender handle unique mesh colors, or are the colors specific to UI theme?
- I bet this would happen on armature level, as there are no separate objects, bones them selves are part of one armature
Q: Is there a keyboard shortcut for manipulator gizmo size, or can I assign such keyboard shortcuts?
- I.e. can I press some key and +/- to resize gizmo?
- Search in User Preferences / Inputs does not bring up any transform or gizmo results
Any help is appreciated, I’ll post solutions myself if I come up with them.
Thanks!