Weight Mapping V4/SASHA in PP2014 - A WARNING!


Because it just happened again:

This weekend I finished painting the weight maps for SASHA's new butt cheeks actors.
I also modified my favourite enemy - the THUMBS which are absolutely awful on original V4 and I never was happy with how they bent in SASHA.

In the process I totally messed up the figure.


WHY?

Because I used the "Symmetry" command to mirror the symmetry from right to left side!
(Yes I should have known better - but heck, I simply forgot!)

The problem showed when I reloaded my file: the "mirror" command actually had mirrored ALL weight maps in ALL body parts, as well as renaming them to an odd and non-descriptive scheme like ""weightMap 1486134872_29" etc.!

This was extremely bad news for me because I had to rebuild all weight maps on the left side after mirroring because of symmetry errors caused by Poser!

The V4 mesh asymetry caused me a lot of headaches already during the original rigging/weightmapping.
Worse, after that unlucky mirroring action, I had to manually restore all weight maps on the left side from a backup, by editing the .cr2 files.


YOU can circumvent this by ! NOT ! ! EVER ! MIRRORING THE ! WHOLE BODY !, but just the single weight maps for each limb - one by one:

• Choose a weight map in the Joint Editor,, click "Copy"
• Select the opposite limb, then click "Paste...".
  Whether you have to mirror it by x, y, or z axis you must find out because it's dependent on the bone's orientation. Try "y" axis for a start, it works most of the times.
• Repeat this procedure for the bulge maps, and make sure to set the bulge values too! (the "right neg" "right pos" "left pos" "left neg" values!)
• Also take extreme care to copy/paste the CORRECT weight maps to the other side!
  It more than once happened to me that I actually copied a weight map into a bump map, and even more frequently a unilateral (right/left) bump map into the wrong one on the opposite side!
• One last tip for now:
  SAVE FREQUENTLY by a new name, so that if you mess up, you have a fallback.
  I Usually save each iteration of my work by a name which contains date and time of day.
  Saved my arse quite a couple of times.:D

I know this is a tedious process and takes a lot of time, but in the end it will spare you a lot of trouble.


I won't delve much deeper into the details for now because that would be a massive tutorial on it's own.

Just so you know that IF you want to modify weight maps on V4/SASHA, ask here for more help!


(to be continued...)


K