Ok, I got what you want, but I absolutely don't see the need for it.
Drag the slider. Interactively watch the change on your envelope. Stop
dragging when things look good. You'll be friggin' fast.
There are lots of occassions where you need numerical precision, but
certainly not when you try around and don't have fixed values in mind,
just for the sake of even percentage numbers. Which get messed up
anyways as soon as you smooth brush your envelope.
Back in the days when we were working with Soft|3d I was a big fan of
the type of tidyness for enveloping you describe, which completely
changed with XSI. The software and the workflow don't demand that
anymore, you get what you see and it plain works.
Cheers,
-André
Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Yes, but I want to do it repeatedly, and that does not work. Only
throug shift-clicking, try it.
Sorry, I really don't get it, slider for interactive weight editing,
typing values directly in the input box for numerical editing. What
are you missing? Typed values don't get transferred to the envelope
until you press return...
Stefan Kubicek wrote:
Thanks Andre, but I think I understand the way skinning in XSI (and
Max) works. They are both very interactive,
yet at the same time iterative. The point I was trying to make was
that I found myself
using the slider more like a button to apply skin weights, although
it is not necessarily
totally obvious that it can even be used as such (shift-click). Some
other people might find the same.
The reson I'm not using it as a slider so much is because I found it
too time consuming fiddling around with the
mouse over the slider, trying to hit the exact value that I desire,
especially if I have to do it repeatedly
over different vertices (which is where the iterational part comes
in) or when you want to increase skin weights in fixed
quantities (e.g. in steps of 5 for example). This is where I'd
rather press a button that adds a fixed quantity of weight
to the vertex. I find this more tidy.
This is definately not a slowdown but a HUGE gain in efficiency.
The beauty of the immediate link between the weight editor and the
envelope is that you can get your character through the rig into a
deformed stage and manipulate the weights interactively while
watching the envelope to change shape. Combined with the individual
viewport display of different construction modes, the weighting
tools are very streamlined and efficient. Weight editing is not
iterative but interactive.
Fred Jacob wrote:
Exact values can be typed in manually, but they are also directly
applied when changed. While this sounds cool this is often slowing
workflow down because more often than none the dialed in value
turns out to be non-ideal (skin weighting is a highly iterative
process), so it would be better to always work with very small
values and incrementally add them to selected vertices. To do this
with the current Edit Tools one constantly has to deselect all
vertices, change the Deformer Weight value, then select some
vertices and shift-click on the slider (something that took me 2
hours to figure out by accident) to assign that small weight change.
This resembles very closely the way skin weights can be applied in
3dsMax, but a dedicated button to assign the weight rather than
having to shift-click the slider would be more obvious, especially
for new users. In this context it would also make more sense to
have the
Deformer Weight slider change not directly result in changed
vertex weights but rather pressing the Add, Add% or Abs buttons
should have this effect instead of them being mere modal buttons.
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