Rigging and Weight Mapping Adding a Bone to a Surface Area

Novica

I did an area on the back of the hand and it originally had a bone, but somehow I deleted it. Now the area is showing up of course, as part of the hip. How do I add a bone to a surface area? I know from reading the article and thread from Thomas, how to change the weight from one bone to another, but I have to do a bone back into this area first. This is my first time doing this so I'm not that frustrated with it, live and learn. I'm thinking it's a good idea not to delete bones until you have the surface area assigned somewhere else.    

I used Geometry Editor and did the geometry assignment, then Create Surface From Selected. It shows up on the left at the bottom of the list as a Surface. So now it's not part of the hip, it has it's own surface section.

Back in the Joint Editor, I duplicated a bone and put it over that surface area. But it doesn't recognize it, of course. So... how do I get the two to say "Hello, wanna hook up?"

Or is there an easier way to remove that part of the surface from the Hip, and put it on the right hand, without going through all that?

Richard Haseltine

Surfaces aren't for rigging, they are for materials - you want a Face Group.

Novica

I had already figured out part of it so far, I assigned polygons then did a Geometry Assign to the face group, then in weight mapping took out the old maps and created new ones. Then I did the weight editing and fill selected. So now the hand is correct.

But when I click the hip, that weight map is still there on the hand. Can weight mapping be on two things, aka the hand and the hip?

Richard Haseltine

Novica said:

I had already figured out part of it so far, I assigned polygons then did a Geometry Assign to the face group, then in weight mapping took out the old maps and created new ones. Then I did the weight editing and fill selected. So now the hand is correct.

But when I click the hip, that weight map is still there on the hand. Can weight mapping be on two things, aka the hand and the hip?

No, if the hand has a weight of 1 then everything else must be 0 - weight maps are, unless you switch the option off, normalised: the ttoal weights on a vertex (for any given axis if using triAx) must add up to exactly 1. Are you sure the weight map is not only there but non-zero for the hip? DS uses sparse mapping  -as I understand it there's a low-precision on/off value so that unweighted vertices consume little memory, that's not the same as having 0 weight explicitly set on the map.

Novica

Well, basically what I'm doing is assigning the weight at 100% by selecting the polygons and assigning them to a face group. It means coloring polygons to get this corrected, but it's working.  I go back in to the weight mapping, remove the hip maps and reload those, and the polygons are in the right surface group. Thanks for the help, so far I think it's right.