Weight Painting

This doc goes into how to Weight Paint using Blender.

Weight painting tells each vertex on your model which bone it needs to move with. If it is set to 0, then the bone will not affect it. If it is set to 1, the vertex will align to the bone 100%. If a vertex has 0.5 on one bone, and 0.5 on another, both bones will affect the vertex 50% each.

• Select the Rig first, then Shift + Click the avatar model.

  • Selecting the Rig first will allow you to select the bones directly while Weight painting.

• Select the Weight Paint pulldown at the top right of the viewport.

• Make sure that Auto Normalize button is on under the 'Options' button at the top right of the Viewport.

  • Auto normalize makes sure that weights will always equal 1 regardless of how many bones affect them, rather than having multiple bones adding to more than 1. This makes understanding the result much easier.

• Use Ctrl + Click to select the bone you would like to adjust the weights to.

• Paint the weights on the model.

  • Adjust the weight, radius and strength of your brush at the top to affect the vertices as needed.

• Hide meshes, or parts of meshes, using the 'H' hotkey after selection.

  • You can use 'Ctrl + L' to select the entire mesh after selecting part of it.

  • To Unhide, you can use 'Alt + H'.

  • Hiding assets is on a mode level (e.g. Weight Paint, Edit, etc.) so if you were to go to Edit mode the polygons would be visible again.

• Deselect the Paint Mask mode if you want to select a different bone to weight paint.

• Use other tools like Blur, Average, Smear or Gradient found on the left of the Viewport to adjust your weights as needed.