Weight loss on Fitted Meshes imported from other tools
There is a possible loss of weight when:
- you have imported your fitted mesh models from another tool
- your fitted meshes have been made in Blender but without Avastar
- you have manually added weights to the Collision Volume Bones.
When one of the above situations occur, then you might possibly loss weight information when you use the fitting panel. The problem here is that the fitting panel is set to classic weighting by default. So Avastar believes all weights are on the blue deform bones. However, Avastar still sees the weights on the collision volumes, but it might not correctly calculate the weight distribution between the deform bone and the collision volume in that case.
The Fitting sliders only work if there is weight on your bones.
Because of this you always have to provide a basically weighted Mesh. Best practice is: Weight your Mesh to the mBones only and make the weighting as perfect as you can for one specific Shape. Only when your basic weighting works nicely switch over to the Fitting Panel and adjust your weights.
The Smooth Weights Tool does not always work
Sometimes the Smooth Weights tool can not optimize the weights for some of the vertices. In that case all you can do is to smooth the mesh itself with the mesh tools instead of relying on the Smooth Weights tool.
Additional notes for the support team
Assume you have made some fitted mesh by using the fitting sliders. Now lets say you want to collect a couple of meshes into a blend file for later reuse or for distribution. However you might not want to add the armatures because they take so much extra storage space. While this works perfectly, there is a problem when you later reuse those meshes:
- Up to Avastar-2RC13 the binding process blindly assumes that the meshes are weighted to the classic bones so all bound meshes have preset the fitting sliders all to 0 (fully classic)
- In Avastar-2RC14 the bind process preserves the fitting slider values when it rebinds a mesh to an Avastar. However when a mesh does not have fitting values they still get automatically preset to 0.
- In Avastar-3 we will probably find a way to preserve the weight distribution of the meshes by automatically determining the slider values form the weight distribution. However that might be a bit of a challenge.