Scope
- Selected Deform Bones
Create Weight maps for the selected bones(1). - Visible Deform Bones
Create weight maps only for the currently visible bones(2) - Enabled Deform Bones
Create weight maps for all bones enabled below
(1) Selecting Bones: Select the Armature in pose mode and select all bones you want to get weighted. Then select the mesh for which you want to get the weight maps
(2) Make Bones visible: You can hide/show bone groups using the Rig Display panel. Or you can open the Armature in pose mode and hide individual bones (use “h” to hide selected bones and “ALT h” to make hidden bones visible)
Enabled Deform Bones
The content of the created weight maps is highly dependent on which bones are treated as deform bones (bones which actually can influence the meshes by using weight maps)
For more about Targets and Sources see next chapter below
By default only the SL Base bones (the legacy skeleton) is enabled. For Extended (Bento-) Rigs also the Hands and Face bones are enabled by default. But you can change this configuration in the Deform Groups Section (see image)
Note: The setting here only controls the behavior of the Weight generator! otherwise this setting is completely independent from what you have configured elsewhere in Blender (either in the Rig Config panel, or in the Bone properties window) .
Important for Automatic from Bones): Please keep the Volume bones disabled when you use the Automatic from Bones strategy. Otherwise the generated weight maps will become totally wrong for this case.
Important for Facemap Generator): Please enable the Face bone group when you use the Facemap Generator strategy. Otherwise the generated weight maps will become totally wrong for this case.
Targets and Sources
Below the strategy selector you find 2 text lines:
- Target maps are the weight maps the will be created.
- Source bones are the bones which are considered to be deforming the Mesh
The content of the 2 lines depends on
- the Scope
- the Bone deform Groups you have enabled
- The visible/selected bones
The first line:
In this example we have chosen the scope Selected Deform Bones. However we have not selected any bone, hence No target map found. Fix: Enable at least one bone that is a member of one of the enabled deform groups.
The second line:
Here you see the number of bones that are contained in the selected deform Groups.
Hint: When the scope is Enabled Deform Bones, then the number of target maps is identical to the number of Enabled Deform bones!
In this example we have selected the legacy bones and the SL Eye bones, hence we get maps for 26 bones.
Weight Sources
All recognized Weight sources are listed in the Weight Sources widget. Here you can select exactly from which meshes you actually want to receive your weights.
Important: Currently only meshes can be used as weight sources when they are bound to the same Avastar Rig. You must select at least one weight source mesh before you can do a weight source copy.
Tip: You can click the eye icons to hide meshes, but then you probably want to enable the Show hidden Sources option as well (image)
Show hidden Sources
List all bound meshes for this Armature. Hidden meshes will have their eye icon turned off.
Tip: You can click the eye icon to toggle the Mesh visibility.
Copy from all listed
Use all listed meshes regardless if they are selected or not
Mesh Copy options
You have further options to specify what exactly the generator shall create for you. See below for a more detailed description
X-Mirror
Makes sure that when you have selected bones only from one side of the rig, the bones on the opposite side are also included even when not selected.
Note: Known glitch in Avastar-2.5: The number of target maps found currently does not count deselected mirrored bones, however the generator still creates the mirrored maps as expected.
Keep empty Maps
The generator always creates all Target maps, even if they turn out to be empty. Normally you do not want to keep empty weight maps. However this option allows you to change that at will
Clear Target maps
When enabled then the weight maps are cleared from all weights before the weight generator adds new weights to them. This is ideal when you want to renew entire weight maps.
However sometimes you want to recreate the weights only for a subset of selected vertices (see next option). In that case you may want to keep the weights of the deselected vertices unchanged. In that case you will disable this option.
Selected Verts
Generate weights only for the selected vertices. This allows you to fine control for which exact parts of your meshes weights are generated or regenerated. Please take into account the previous option above.