Weight Mover

[Brain_Mesh_Agent]

I have been working on smart skinning my characters shoulder areas for years

with no success, I have tried many different things with smartskin and I

always get some horrible creasing artifacts when I bent the arms in certain

positions.

 

I added some intermediate bones, used wm, and when I went to

test it in am I was floored when I saw that my characters shoulders worked

absolutely perfect in any direction I bent them. Having perfect shoulder deformation is something I have been working on for a long long time, and this tool just does the best job yet. It only had a little distortion when I bent to absolutely unrealistic angles.

 

The pelvic area of my model did have distortions, but I was expecting them since the area was modeled so low detail because that was the only way I could easily create the kinds of joints in the upper thigh region. Im sure that if I added in the detail that I wanted to have in the first place in those areas that wm would work

perfectly.

 

I just read the post about weight mover being obsolete. I doubt this is true, although I have not noticed the new cp weight editor in A:M v11, I don't think it would be nearly as quick as having WM automatically set up your bones weights, rather than manually doing it for each bone. With WM, you won''t have to remember any individual weight values or anything.

 

Since WM can quickly create a basic skin deformation, you can always use smartskin to fine tune your skin deformations. But having that basic deformation makes the smartskinning less difficult, especially when the hardest parts such as the hips and shoulders, which can all be done almost fully automatic with WM. This allows A:M users to create much more detail in their models and thats always been one of the greatest challanges to overcome for me at least, how to easily and accurately manipulate all the detail in the models we make.

[Surly Bird]

Yeah. WeightMover rocks!