Weight copying for region

[SickAlice]

I've been employing a different weight copying method in Blender I thought I'd share. This presumes one already understands the weight copying process of course which can be learned via Randomdays " Meshing and Skinning for those who can't " thread here or the copy of that tutorial I'm hosting on my site.

I won't have to put down an intense tutorial as this is pretty easy to do. A problem I've run into often is parts picking up the animation from neighboring vertices. For example a raised piece is assigned to the torso of a male basic mesh but picks up some data from the nearby arm because it's too close to it. Or a boot piece bends at the kneecap when it shouldn't. The trick is before weight copying to delete any vertices on the donor mesh you wouldn't want to use until you only have just the part of the model left you'd want to copy from. So for instance for our boots we would only want the bit of the calves below the kneecap and above the ankle left on the screen. This way the part will only copy the information for those Bipeds but no other. I'm finding this trick is especially useful in making characters that transform, like a character that changes into something else during an animation or vanishes (phase/burrow) whereas a person can assign all the mesh parts and drop them right in the main body node then account for that in the keyframes, rather than attempting to account for all attached parts in the keyframes file.

This is the inverted of version of the trick where a person copies from multiple weighted parts at once, like say a body and a cape at the same time in order to make a glider or wings. In that a person would merge both donor objects and weight copy from the remaining single piece object, in case anyone doesn't have that down yet. Also a useful trick itself.