Binding Process: Set Up #11 - Paint Weights Tool

This tool allows you to go paint the weights in manually on your model – which means you can determine if a joint as a little influence, maxium influence or no influence for certain joints. This was my more preferred method in comparison to using the Component Editor I spoke about in an earlier post.

Fig 1: The hierarchy in the Paint Weights Tool

When in the Paint Weights Tool, the important bit I had to remember the three colours that were visible when I selected a joint within the hierarchy: Black, White, and Grey (Fig 2).

Fig 2: The colours used to represent the influence

• Black = no influence
• Grey = partial influence
• White = maxium influence

Fig 3: Paint Weights expanded

There are also 4 main kinds of painting for the weights (Fig 4): Add, Replace, Smooth and Scale (didn't use that). Painting with Add does exactly what it says - Adds the amount of influence you want onto a part of the mesh. Works well for adding that little bits of influence for small parts of a character.  

Replace will replace any part of influence on the mesh with the value that it is set. Works well 

Smooth is used for parts of the mesh where certain vertices bend into each other. This proved particularly useful for the part of the mesh that's at the back of the knees. 

Fig 4: Smooth Paint weight is used for the bend at the back of the knee.

This way was particularly more easier to use than the previous way - it just seemed a better way of seeing where influence needed to be especially if you have a small animation of particular movement on the joints just help keep an eye for detail in that sense.

I would of liked to go on more about the set up part of the binding process, but I feel as if I have covered more than enough on the technical side of the process, now to the animating.