Using Weighting Tools to Give Life to a Mesh

In the previous chapter, we added objects, selected them, and edited them in Edit Mode while moving our view around in the 3D viewport.

In this chapter, we will start by adding a mesh to the scene. We will enter Edit Mode, make loop cuts, extrude and scale, and cover basic transforms in Edit Mode. We will learn more about our view and the modes we can use to get more information and a clearer view of our work. Then, we will use the correct parent constraint to set us up for the most important topic in this book, weight painting.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

• Creating a mesh
• Prelude to painting

By the end of this chapter, you will be prepared for weight painting correctly and be able to use its basic tools to assign weights to vertices with the correct bones selected.

Creating a mesh

We can’t do any weight painting without a mesh; that much should be clear to anyone. There are, however, some important steps to take that will prevent headaches in the future, such as placing vertices in optimal places to support quality deformation. If the mesh is constructed poorly, no matter how perfect your weight painting, it will be impossible to get a good result.

To start, we need to add some mesh to our scene. We will go over some terminology once we have done this. Follow these steps:

1. To start, make sure you are in Object Mode (Tab, or dropdown), go ahead and bring up the Add object menu with Shift + A, then navigate to Mesh | Cube and add a cube. Your scene should look as follows:

Figure 3.1 – Cube added to our scene

2. We want this cube to be a tower in between our bones. To do this, we’re going to go into Edit Mode and make sure we have selected Vertice mode. The blue icon next to the...

Prelude to painting

Now let’s get into the bulk of our work, weight painting.

Firstly, we need to parent the mesh to the armature, so that Blender knows that the mesh belongs to the bones. If we didn’t do this, we couldn’t assign our weights to the bones.

Here’s how we parent our object to the armature:

1. Ensure you are in Object Mode.
2. Select the Mesh first (order is important).
3. Select the bones with Shift + RMB.
4. Press Ctrl + P.

   In Figure 3.9, we can see the Set Parent To menu:

Figure 3.9 – Set Parent To menu

There are multiple entries here in the menu, all of which do something different. The first set of options are related to simple object parent relations and are of no concern to us right now, but in case you are wondering, here’s a brief description of each:

• Object: The child objects will inherit the transformations of the parent.
• Object (Keep Transform): The child objects...

Summary

We started the chapter by learning about the basic terminology for Blender, that is, bones, meshes, and weights:

• The head is the joint placed at the wider part of the bone; the tail is the thinner part
• Weights range from 0 to 1.0, or from cold to hot
• We can bring up the Add Object menu with Shift + A
• We can scale (S), rotate (R), and transform (G) any selected item

We added both a cube and an armature to the scene with the Add objects pop-up menu and entered Edit Mode (Tab), or we could have used the dropdown pictured in Figure 2.3 in Chapter 2.

Once in Edit Mode, for both the mesh and armature, we cut, scaled, transformed, and extruded (E) to form two towers of bones with mesh in between.

We then learned how to get set up for weight painting by pressing Ctrl + P after selecting the mesh before the bone. Finally, we weight-painted a mesh by selecting the correct bones and used the ability to pose bones in Weight Paint mode to verify that our...