Video Game Production Techniques - Weight Painting

Through my character based research and studies in this unit, I have also had to take a look at weight painting, which in its simplest form, constrains which vertices can be manipulated by the skeletal animations when taking the joints into account.

As a low poly character had been provided for weight painting research and practice, I began by setting the view options to x-ray joints and binding the skeleton within the scene to the mesh, allowing me to begin the weight painting procedure.
Short animations can also be applied prior to the painting of weights, this allows for ease through the working pipeline as an animation can simply be played to allow a view in progress of the weight painting, with the timeline being set back to the start to manipulate further.

I began with the black and white view, which allows for a simpler approach to weight painting, with a two tone view on which vertices are allowed to be manipulated. Using this method, vertices in contact with a more progressively white shade are manipulated more when animating, using a black to white value of 0 to 1.

I started at the left shoulder and began working my way down to the fingers, mostly negating the manipulation of vertices through painting of negative values represented as black in the viewport, and adjusting as necessary as I went, through trial and error testing with slight rotations in joints, as can be seen by the bend in the elbow through the images below.

As can be seen with the final screenshot, the arm bent perfectly at the elbow joint, this is because I have no effect painted onto any vertices above the elbow, if vertices are painted above the elbow then manipulation errors begin to occur during animation.

I took the weight painting a step further by using the fully coloured filter, going from blue to red, , through Green, Yellow, and Orange progressively in scales of manipulation.
I was aiming to have the painted weights as near as the black to white scale, and adjusted any painted sections accordingly.

Once happy with the results through each joint I mirrored the painted weights, this did present some errors in the form of weights painting themselves into position, but these were rectified easily enough.

I feel I have gained enough of a basic knowledge through this to progress with weight painting at a later date, as and when I have time to do so or whenever it is required for a project, my skills are by no means developed, but I will look to work further on them in the future and further my understanding of weight painting.