Delicious Dev Report #6 - The Joy of Weight Painting!

Howdy doodles! It’s Pat again to talk about the “Joy” of Weight Painting.

I glossed over this in the last entry because I’ve been waaaaay spoiled by Blender’s auto-weight tool working. I must have goofed on something while working on Frank because once I parented the rig to the mesh I got…this.

why is everything moving like that oh no

The auto-weight failed me. Or I failed it. 

What did I do differently this time? Is it because I repositioned the mesh and didn’t change its new center point? Did I extrude out the legs incorrectly? Is it because I gave this character FINGERS? What in the world-- ah forget it. 

Tried a bunch of these things and still had bad results. So, time to get to work!

Thankfully not all of these auto-weights were terrible but??

This meant that I had to go through each bone and check what vertices were being influenced and try moving it around. It made sense to start at the ends and put the most weight at the tips (toes, fingers) before moving towards the center of the armature. While the x-mirror feature here wasn’t perfect, it did mean that I didn’t have to re-do most of the heavy work but a spot-check was necessary to make sure nothing weird got left behind.

Getting there...

One new challenge I experienced while working on Frank was dealing with his fingers. I didn’t feel like I needed them with the other characters’ hands since BellyBuster didn’t need them or the focus was on Dondo’s open palms and Slice’s pie-blade.

"Look, ma! No fingers!"

Insisting on Frank’s fingers meant that each finger joint needed to be painted. Making sure each one influenced the others juuuust the right took a while and in the moment felt like a real slog to do.

And while I’m mostly happy with the result for this-

Wait, no..

It’s not 100% perfect, but it’ll do for now! Now that we’re ready it’s time to start animating! 

Overall this was a pretty fruitful learning experience! It took a while, and figuring out the workflow got me more than a little grumpy sometimes but the end result is something I'm super happy with.

Once we had our animations done, it was time to start importing them into Unity and wouldn’t you know it..

Seriously?!

The normals. Were backwards. All(?) of the mesh’s faces were pointing inwards. Among the other weird mis-steps along the way this may have been the thing that caused the auto-weight to fail. I-I just...alright.

Lessons learned, another thing to watch out for next time.

That’s it for this week’s Delicious Dev Report! Hope y’all found this interesting and feel free to hit us up with comments or questions if you wanna know more!

-Pat
0w07