Vertex weighting question

[Anavel Gato]

I was wondering about the weighting of the vertices in the hand. I read in Spacemonkey's tutorial that you cannot assign more that 4 (or 5 I can't remeber the exact number) bones to a model. Now the hand in my Padme model is 1 model that includes all the fingers and I believe this is the same in the Kyle model too. How can you assign all of the available hand bones to the same hand model? Because I think that the hand bones exceed the magical number 4 (or 5 ).

 

Besides that do actually you need to assign bones to the fingers? Since the player is always holding a weapon maybe a hand model that has the fingers fixed in 1 position is sufficient.

[Major Clod]

You can have more than 4 bones assigned to a model. You just cannot have more than 4 bones weighted to an individual vertice. So although there may be 16 or so bones in the hand, as long as no vertices in your mesh are affected by four or more of those, then it should be fine. I would recommend assigning the fingers to the finger bones. The best way to do this is to manually weight the vertices to the bones, otherwise you will have one fingers bones affecting another finger, and all hell will break loose!

 

Basically, I have the finger joint in my mesh positioned over the joint in the bones, then I select all the verts for that particular joint, and assign them to the bone on one side of the joint, weighting them at 0.5, then weight them to the bone on the other side at 0.5. This way you should get a nice balance of movement on the joint.

[Anavel Gato]

Thanks for the clear answer! This will get me started...

 

But first I need to allign the bones to my model.

Does it matter if you allign (rotate & scale) the bones with the model and not the model with the bones?

I only need to allign the bones in the fingers with the model since I had modelled the hand with the fingers straightened.

[spacermonkey]

yup, clod is right - 4 bones influences per vert - otherwise you will get an error when compiling.

[Major Clod]

It should be fine to move the bones in the hand. Any minor adjustments like that are fine, but if you move major bones like arms or legs around, it can result in bad mesh deforming.

[V!G]

You want to make your mesh fit the bones. You should not bend the bones to fit your mesh. I belive if you move the bones all hell will break loose later on.

 

You may want to back up your model and try it, that way if it doesn't work you can always fall back?

 

V!G

[Anavel Gato]

Thanks for clearing this all up guys (girls? )!

I'll just adjust the mesh to fit the bones. I don't want to risk bad mesh deformation.