From Meshes

The weights are copied from the other meshes bound to the same Skeleton. The weights are copied by projection. So the closer the target mesh shape matches to the source meshes shape, the better will be the weight copy results.

For (bones)

  • Selected Enabled Deform Bones
    Create Weight maps for the selected bones:

    • Select the Mesh
    • SHIFT select the Armature in Pose mode
    • Select all bones you want to take into account for the weight copy.
  • Visible Enabled Deform Bones
    Create weight maps only for the currently visible bones:

    • Select the Mesh
    • SHIFT Select the Armature in Pose mode
    • Make all bones visible which you want to take into account for the weight copy.
  • Enabled Deform Bones
    Create weight maps for all bones enabled below:

    • Select the Mesh
    • Avastar take all Deform Bones into account for the Weight Copy.

Tip: Make Bones visible/invisible: 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 Bone Groups

The content of the created weight maps is highly dependent on which bones are marked 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 Enabled Deform Bone 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 Method. Otherwise the generated weight maps will become totally wrong for this case.

Targets and Sources

Below the method selector you find 2 text lines:

  • n Selected/visible/deform bones used.
  • m deform bones enabled

The content of the 2 lines is derived from

  • the For: Selection (for which bones you want weight maps)
  • the Enabled Deform Bone Groups you have enabled
  • The visible/selected bones in the Armature

The first line:

In this example we have chosen the scope Selected enabled Deform Bones. However we have not selected any bone, hence No selected bone used Fix: Select at least one bone which is a member of one of the selected deform bone groups.

The second line:

Here you see the number of bones which are contained in the selected deform Groups (98 in the example above).

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 (SL Base), Hands and Face, hence we get maps for 98 bones.

Copy weight from …

All recognized Weight sources are listed in the Weight Sources widget. Here you select the meshes from which your target mesh shall receive the 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.

Tips:

  • You can click the eye icon to toggle the Mesh visibility.
  • You can click the select icon to toggle the Mesh selectivity.

 

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

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.