In the course where the shoulder armour of the Orc is being parented to an empty and the empty parented to the clavical bone, in the course the shoulder armour is detached from the body of the orc. However, I followed the steps exactly as laid out in the course, my shoulder armour still gets deformed when I move the arm or moves differently as I move and rotate the shoulder. The empty I created moves correctly, but the shoulder armour moves differently from the empty, although it’s parented to the empty.
I went into weight painting mode and saw that three bones have an influence on the shoulder pad. When I paint it all blue on one bone, move to another and paint it blue again, It becomes red again when I switch back to the first bone. How can I keep the weight at blue (weight 0) for every bone?
First, Fixing your problem. Remove all vertex groups for the armor piece.
Second, Understanding Normalize. All vertex groups must equal 1. If you have 2 Vertex groups and one is weighted at 0.2 and the other is weighted at 0.3 then when they get normalized(Thru the auto Normalize being on) They become 0.4 and 0.6. With auto normalize on when you paint 0.0 on the second group it will make the first group 1.0. Then when you go and paint 0.0 on the first group it makes the second group 1.0. So, in this case you would want to turn off auto normalize.
Third, Optimizing your rig. It is better to select vertices and remove them from the group. This can be done thru the the buttons under the vertex groups list or using the Vertex Group popup/sub menu which can be accessed while in edit mode with ctrl+g hotkey or the vertex menu.
Another option is to remove all group influence for any weights below a certain weight level. To do this while in object mode click the object menu->Clean up->Clean Vertex Group Weights. Then on the adjust last operator box(Bottom left hand corner of 3D Viewport or press F9) Set limit to the weight level you want. So if a weight is equal to or lower then this it will be removed. The Subset should be set to All Groups. You can also set it to do just the active group. If you check keep single then it will keep the vertices in a single vertex group instead of removing it from all if it’s weights are below the limit in all groups. This can also be accessed in weight paint mode thru the menu Weights->Clean.
You may be asking why remove the vertices from groups. The reason is that it adds CPU time. Each very low or zero vertex in a group has to be calculated on every frame of an animation. If the weight is zero then this is a waste of CPU processing. which even though it’s a small fraction of time that time adds up the longer your animation becomes. For example if it take 0.001 second to process a zero vertex and you have 3 vertex groups that total 100 vertices set to zero that becomes 0.1 second. If you have an animation that is 100 frames long then that is 10 seconds added to your render time for roughly 4 seconds of animation. Not to mention while you’re animating that is 0.1 second added to every frame that you go thru flipping/scrubbing thru frames or playing the animation to check and adjust your animation.
Thanks a lot!
Removing all vertex groups from the shoulder armour indeed did the trick. I first tried doing it through weight painting with auto normalise off, but it gave other weird glitches as (I suppose) wasn’t able to put all at weight 0.
Just for reference if someone else has this problem:
To remove the vertex groupes from the shoulder plate and pikes, I went into object mode, select the object (shoulder armour), go to edit mode, vertex select mode, select all and with CTRL+G choose “Remove all Groups” from the drop-down menu. Repeat for the other objects.
You can also remove all group thru the vertex group panel of the data/mesh tab of the properties editor. Under the plus and minus buttons is a dropdown button that gives a menu. Choose Delete all Groups. It’s available in all modes including object and edit.
Yup, thanks.
Strangely, this is explained in the Blender 2.8 part of the course, but it’s not repeated in the 4.3 Blender part of the course, which I followed. I saw it today in the Blender 2.8 course where he gets the animations from Mixamo.
I’m rendering a walking cycle as I’m typing
