A question about mirroring meshes and skeletons

[h27kim]

Hi,

I've found a nice mod that has just one set of gloves (Acolyte of Kynareth by Korana, btw: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/27530).  I was figuring that, since I'm learning how to use Blender (v. 3.6) anyways, it would be a good practice to create a mirror mesh to make a pair of gloves.  So the mirroring the mesh worked fine, but, once you see it in game (or CS, actually), the duplicated side has issues--which I recognized as a bones issue.  But this is where I'm completely stuck:  I can't seem to figure out how to get the bones and weights right:  the best I could do was to manually assign bones from the opposite side--which, at least, got rid of the spikes, but the weights are all wrong, as seen from clippings.  Whenever I tried to mirror and/or copy the vertex weights in Blender, I noticed that the wrong bones are inserted (e.g. it creates right hands instead of the left hands--and the new bones don't have the mirrored weights of the original bones, presumably because they are not "left" bones.)  I can't seem to figure out how this works and most of the instructions on Reddit, etc. seem either wrong, not applicable to this version, or otherwise not followable.  Suggestions/help, please!?

[Vagrant0]

As far as I remember, you basically have to re-weight the mesh to the right bones and clear out any existing weights. Most methods of trying to copy weights will run into the same problem you have where it will try to assign other bones. You could, technically, go through each vertex and copy weights to the corresponding bone, I think, but that may take longer than just trying to re-weight it from scratch or copy weights from a gauntlet for that hand.

[Striker879]

Have a look at Mesh Rigger ... a Skyrim utility but it works with Oblivion too (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/87672).

[h27kim]

Thanks to you both.  Assigning bones and weights to mesh is pretty tricky!  Will report back after some more experimentation!

[h27kim]

Update:  OK, the Mesh Rigger turned out to do exactly what I was hoping could be done.  (I do have a lot of properly rigged meshes that are close, just not exactly the same) and I was hoping something would just copy the bones and weights--I think that's what it does.)

It does seem to involve a bit of tinkering around (the portable python that it comes with doesn't seem to work with anything complex) but I did manage to get it to work (although I'm not entirely what I did).  

 

Thanks!!! 

[Striker879]

I primarily use it for giving BBB meshes alternative weightings. I use the number of vertexes to change some of the more subtle effects of using mesh B's weightings on mesh A. The default is 3 ... I mostly use values of 6 or higher.