Weight-painting has me on the ropes

[DOTwarpunk]

I'm throwin' in the towel here.

 

Been working on an outfit for quite a while and it's ALMOST complete. I have it working in-game with no issues EXCEPT for the weights.

 

For the most part, it's all fine except for the little buttons and the belt which have SERIOUS clipping/warping issues and I just can't get the weight-painting right, and Bodyslide has me at my wits end. If someone would be willing enough to bring their hand into my project I would be forever grateful.

 

I may be asking a lot here and I wouldn't be asking if I knew any way I could pull it off myself but if you're feeling generous gimme a shout and I'll pass you the file.

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwJkwWo-OnAMaXdNX0daYTZ3Y1E

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwJkwWo-OnAMM0FVYS1hb2o1dlk

[JonathanOstrus]

Weight painting is a very underrated skill. That said Outfit Studio is terrible for doing it. Don't get me wrong, you can do it there. I have. But it's extremely hard. You'll likely have to strip all the weights off and paint the whole thing by hand to get it the way you want sometimes. That's what I ended up doing for some outfits.

 

Prior to trying that if you want to experiment with the copy weights you'll want to adjust the distance slider. Strip all the weights off and then copy from a reference but use a small distance range so you don't get too many bones on the same vertices. It can be a time consuming process. You can then also go in and manually touch up the weights if desired. Keep in mind you can also mask off areas so it doesn't copy weights to them so you can use a short distance on some areas but then large distance on others. From the looks of the images it seems like the sleeve strap may not even be weighted which means you need to do it manually.

 

You may also need to cut out any underlying body mesh that may be clipping. Depending on the way the clothing and body is modelled there may be cases where no amount of bone weight fiddling will ever be able to prevent clipping if there is incompatible mesh geometry. This is one reason that a lot of armor and clothing author's cut out body parts that are not visible. The other being less burden on the rendering engine to try and draw something you can't see anyway.

[DOTwarpunk]

My biggest issue, really is just getting Bodyslide to work. About 90% of the time I'm fighting to get it to select the right vertex because it'll select all the vertices BEHIND the one I'm working with and rotating to get a different angle is jarring as the camera is centered on the scene root with no way to change it.

 

Thanks for the reply tho, definitely gave me a few more ideas to try, although I think I'm gonna start another project before I try them out, I've been screwing with this outfit for long enough. I need a break xD

[JonathanOstrus]

My biggest issue, really is just getting Bodyslide to work. About 90% of the time I'm fighting to get it to select the right vertex because it'll select all the vertices BEHIND the one I'm working with and rotating to get a different angle is jarring as the camera is centered on the scene root with no way to change it.

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Thanks for the reply tho, definitely gave me a few more ideas to try, although I think I'm gonna start another project before I try them out, I've been screwing with this outfit for long enough. I need a break xDÂ

Sometimes exporting the shape and cutting it up into more shapes is the only way to handle the vertices selection problem. Unless you can somehow mask it out.