(If you've not done weight painting before find some simple tutorials to get some practice before trying this)
I'm not sure I can recommend the automatic weights. It seems to give quite a low influence to the parts of the mesh you want and has a small influence over everywhere else. The result is you have to go over the whole model removing the unwanted influence from each bone and strengthening it where needed.
First things first. What to Weight paint?
It seems that in earlier versions of Rigify you needed to select a hidden layer of bones to parent them to the mesh. Now you don't, but you do need to unhide them for weight painting.
This gives you an extra set of boans which the mesh is actually boned to (it is not connected to the control bones). Remember 'Envelopes' should be unchecked as weight painting uses Vertex Groups.
You can see the new set of bones is much like the original rig we used to set up Rigify but for some reason we have two bones for each section of each major limb. (dunno why, but they both have an influence created under automatic weights.)
Secondly, you need to reduce any subdivision modifier on your model to just about 0. Weight painting seems to be a lot slower in 2.6 than it was in 2.49b and you need all the help you can get. Also, make sure that the Armature modifier is the first modifier in the modifier stack for the Model (ie. above subsurf). this seems to speed things up a bit.
Now you can spend ages weight painting everything - good luck and drink lots of tea.
Weight painting fingers is nigh impossible and needs to be taken into acount when making the model. Disregard the position of the legs and fingers in the Rigify initial rig and have the legs and fingers spread to reduce you problems later.
nice tip: See face Selection Masking here http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Weight_Paint#Face_Selection_Masking
Next - How to move the arms and legs about.... not as easy or straight forward as it sounds.
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ReplyDeleteIf you have two armatures in the smae place you forgot to move the original armature before you push the "generate" button in the "Rigify Buttons" panel in the properties window, with the object tab selected ( icon looks like a man )
See cessen2 on YouTube named Rigify Early Demo 2