Basics of Weightpainting - Beginner VRChat Avatar Blender Tutorial

hi in today's video I'm going to explain the absolute basics of rigging and weight painting mainly weight painting it's uh kind of the most difficult topic when it comes to 3D modeling for VR chat I think and it takes a lot of time to understand so don't be frustrated and mad at yourself if you don't understand uh fast because it takes time for me it also took a lot of time to understand how this works even remotely um the joke is that you know you don't understand anything and then one day you wake up and you kind of get it it like clicks it is kind of that way so you know I wish you all the best and uh let me know what you think about the tutorial and if you have any questions the first thing that we need to do is to set up blender a little bit because the default settings are not ideal so the first thing you need to do always check this before you weight paint anything go into your little um you know window here go to Tool uh change your amount to weight pay mode and then click options in the tool here and click Auto normalize if you don't do this it's gonna get really weird you're not gonna make any sense of it just do it if you want to know what this actually does I'm not going to go over it here just Google it because it's just like oh my god dude like if I notice like a year ago it would be much easier so just do this man and the second thing is it's more like a quality of life thing so we're going to edit in your preferences let me check this here and you go into white paint in the editing uh part of the settings and you see your colors are going to look different um for you it's going to go from Blue to red and I have it set up this way and I'll tell you why um in the default settings it's very difficult to see sometimes when you have zero weight somewhere and then you have 0.0001 for example we're gonna We want to prevent that so we clearly know where we have one weight which is here and no weight at all which is zero which is right here and you can see how I have these like buttons created and oh there we go you can see let me click on the purple one it's quite difficult so don't be frustrated at this you basically add a bunch of new ones using the plus buttons and then you drag them around and then you change the colors to what you want I recommend using the same colors as I do so you know you can fold the tutorial pretty accurately so basically you set up your zero to a purple you set up your number one let me check this your number one to White then you create these two ones using the plus button which I'm going to undo and you drag it or you can also change the value here to 0.99 and pink one to 0.01 and this will make it so the colors are very recognizable when we have absolute one and then we have absolute zero on your settings what I also recommend is go into your preferences and go into the key map tab and change the spacebar action to search now what this will do you'll press your spacebar and you can look for things like for example all these different functions that you can look for it's much faster much more useful in practice I think so I highly recommend you to do this as well so with that I'm going to continue with my tutorial and you go let us first assume that um this little object is going to be a ring so I'm gonna do a little programming move here I'm gonna push my L on my keyboard push s to scale it to scale it on y pushing the Y button I'm gonna put it literally over this bone and this bone is going to be our finger bone and this is going to be the ring that we want to move with the finger absolutely so the first part we're going to be learning is how to weight paint stuff to one bone which is quite easy and it's not difficult at all so first thing we need to do we need to tether the actual Armature the skeleton or actually never mind we need to tell the mesh that it's going to be influenced by the Armature by the skeleton because if we don't do it it's you know it doesn't know that it needs to be moved with it so if you go into your mesh you go into the modifier properties you add Armature and you select your Armature you can do trap and drop here and now it's going to move with the Armature the thing is it doesn't know how to do it so we need to tell it how to do it for next we create object data properties and vertex groups now this group has no meaning currently it doesn't do anything and for weight painting you need to create group for every bone that you want to influence your model your mesh so in this case I'm going to click my Armature click tab to get into edit mode and select this bone and this bone is called bone number two so and I wanted to much to move with ball number two so I'm going to go back in object mode select my mesh again and I'm going to rename this or you can also create new ones I'm going to rename this to Boom 2. and I go to my Waypoint mode and now I'm editing weight painting on my bone 2 for this match so what is the easiest for me I think is to change into the wireframe so I can actually see all the you know vertices and such I'm going to zoom in and how do you actually tell your blender what to move like what way and such which is difficult to explain and difficult to understand so I'm going to go really really thoroughly into this we use uh the colors the weights that we said before and it goes from zero to one zero meaning no influence at all one meaning absolute influence like 100 influenced by disc bone this particular and you can um see that here I have the purple color which we said in our preferences is zero so it doesn't move with the vertex group at all it doesn't move with anything in fact right now so how do we actually change it uh there's multiple ways of you to you can do this you can pick your draw tool and you can set the weight here and you can literally just paint and you can see how I left click and paint and it changes all the vertices to uh absolute ones and gradients into zero so I can actually test this right now and I'm gonna see how just these vertices are going to be influenced so I'm going to go into object mode I'm gonna go select my Armature and go into post mode left click bone number two and I'm gonna move it around and you can see how it actually moves what I painted so I'm gonna go back into my Waypoint mode and when you want to like paint like a big chunk of a mesh you don't necessarily want to do it by hand at all so for that we have the gradient tool and the gradient tool works that you can like literally just click and drag but you see it's changing like these different meshes that we want you know these different parts of mesh that we don't want to to change so I Ctrl Z to you know cancel and there's these two little functions which is super useful to masking so I'm going to left click this one and you can see I can literally like select faces to paint over and if you click this little select box you can actually click and drop and select different like faces and also if you just push your L key on your keyboard it selects the all the you know the connected mesh so that's what we're gonna do now I'm gonna do it again I'm gonna click out here I'm gonna push my L key and this part is selected so now I can go back to my gradient and I can append the whole thing and you can see how the first try it didn't do perfectly so it like this is probably 0.5 it's like 0.8 and we want it to be one like absolutely moved only by this ball so I'm gonna do it again and a bunch of times until I see traffic light and I'm going to show you uh see how you have these little splashes of red which means it's not absolute one for example if you had the default to blender colors you would not be necessarily able to see it see it because it blends the colors like so closely it's like super difficult to see sometimes so this is why you do the color settings that I recommended now that we have this painted let us tree we'll see how it works in pose mode again I'm gonna post my little bone here and see how the whole thing moves with it very nice and what can sometimes happen is that for example you have like different groups here let's see let's name this bone one and Bone because we have these bones are called bone bone one and you have like all these weird weights for example I'm gonna just randomly change my weight to like zero point this to g200 to this and here I'm gonna do this and you don't have to do this by the way this is only to show you what can happen and you're gonna pose your bone and it's going to be doing like weird deforms like this and you're going to be folk you know confused like why is this happening like this is weird I didn't do this what what the hell so I recommend you to like just go into white paint mode and click through all the different groups and you can see ah yes I don't want this way to be here and also not here so I need to fix it so what you do is you can uh take your gradient and set it to zero you can also paint the zero like remove weights so I'm gonna do it right here multiple times so I can clear the seeds on the Zero and on the other part the other ball and see everything's fixed back and our bone is at uh number zero and number one Let's uh change it here and you can see how everything works pretty well so how do we make this so it bends with two bones okay let's presume uh this little thing here is an arm and I want this for example to be like a I don't know like an armband and it's gonna be I'm gonna rescale it put it here and let's say we want it to bend right here so we need to tell blender to apply some weights on this bone and some Lanes on this one so we already have and I wait because we can see here the paints set up on uh different the small the bone number two and Bone number one is this one and we need to add some weights here as well and you're gonna see as we have Auto normoza normalized on then as we paint colors on weights on this bone it's going to change it on the bone number two as well so click number bone number one group and we you can see there's no weights yet at all so I'm gonna actually draw some and I'm gonna do it by hand actually this time and you can see through the bones bone is right here so I'm gonna paint it just about here like all around the whole thing it's going to take a while so be patient and I also need to paint this area no it's too much you can also push your F key on your keyboard and just resize your brush it's gonna paint the whole thing okay now we're gonna take a look at the bone number two again and you can see how this changed there's no weights on this part it's how we want it and there's like a mixed weight here what blender does essentially uh it takes into account the weights applied to each bone and calculates how much each bone have influence over the faces or the vertices which are the you know the points so you can see here oh I didn't want to do that you can see here it is like mixed color so we're gonna open the preferences again to C for reference so the Green in the middle represents approximately 0.5 so we can see both Bones have like 50 percent or more or less influence over the center and we can test this in practice we go object mode select the Armature and pose mode and R and just you know move things you can see how it bends but it's not perfect you want it better so we can uh make that a bit more smooth so we go to wave paint again and there's a bunch of options you can use for this like blur and average if you click average you can actually like smoothen colors much better like this which is going to produce a bit better result you can also use a smear but smear is moral for like doing this for example like dragging the colors to a different dial you know to a specific Direction like this so let's see how this looks now with like a bit of blurring that's a bit better but it's not like you know it's not 100 percent you can see also here the thing is white bearing is um bit of an art so to make stuff look super clean super nice actually takes a lot of practice so let me actually there's a function you can do reset Ankit and it's gonna go back to the normal state there we go you can also when you're painting instead of draw you can also do add for example if you want a little bit of weight somewhere like 0.1 you can add and click and just you're gonna add constantly only 0.1 unless you release your mouse and click again and you're gonna get again 0.1 stack it the same works for subtract which you can like delete 0.1 you can also multiply mix light and darken I'll never use Lycan lichen and darken let's see what it does because I have no clue very interesting very cool I have no idea what it does but yes mainly use draw or or add or subtract so let's let's say we want this to be like all around perfect 0.5 so we just pushed and put the number here and we paint it by hand you're gonna see it's gonna be much smoother also if you want to pick a color I mean pick a weight you can also do that there's this little tool to sample weight just click it you click here and now we go back to your brush and you can see it selected the uh the weight so I'm going to paint it all the way here it's going to smoothen things a lot more there we go also I want to add one to like this area so I'm just going to quickly smoothen everything out and as you and also I'm saying it again if you change the colors the way I do you can see all these little you know problems much better than in the usual setting the blender default setting there you go this is very nice I'm also going to sample weights in here again it's a little tool just click 0.176 and I'm gonna paint oh that's a lot though not sure I want that let me do that again let me do it here okay that's a bit more it's giving me a lot of weight interesting not what I want what if I click here 2.44 that's a lot of weight maybe I can do it on this little side which should be like zero point something right now this is zero okay sometimes it's a bit of a detective work yeah there you go this is what I wanted and I don't want to add I want to draw my weight that's too little so I actually draw I select again let's see let's say I click here yeah that's the color I wanted like as you can see I'm also like that hundred percent because wave padding is a lot of experimenting a lot of trying stuff out don't be frustrated like literally everybody has gone through this you know it's like it's very difficult it's very frustrating so you know just it's kind of like just you just kind of spend your day practicing and suddenly you just understand a lot more it is what it is so now we can see how the weights are painted you know it looks pretty clean to me you can see check on the other bonus well it's pretty clean there's a little mistake here which we can actually fix there we go that's very nice though so let us pick our post mode again and post this bone and you can see you know it's getting deformed really nicely that's very nice let me show you in this mode yeah it looks like a I don't know a sock or whatever it's very nice and also when you don't when it's like when it looks too choppy to you and you think your weights are right and this takes like experience actually to be able to like kind of decide if you need to adjust your weights or do what I'm about to tell you so you know don't worry about it like practice you can add topology so you go into edit mode and for example you think that you need some more nice bending here you just add an edge Loop just add it here for example here as well and you go back into your post mode and you check again and you're like well actually you know this looks a bit better you know it might be like you can see it actually looks a bit intense a bit better because it has to bend on something right you don't have to you cannot have like two Edge loops and think it's going to bend like in you know as your finger does so yeah you can see it's a bit more it's a bit smoother so sometimes you uh when it comes to like all these bendy areas like armpits uh you know elbows wrists also knees sometimes you need to add a little bit geometry to your model so it bends nicely that's my experience anyway so yeah you can also in your post mode that this is a good trick you can pose your bone in your post mode and white paint in it you can actually see where you have like issues in bending and such and uh you can actually fix them like I can show you like I can literally paint now this is going to be kind of tricky but you know sometimes you have like just gonna end furiously paint you have like these weird issues and uh you know posing your bone in different poses is gonna show these issues quite well and then you can paint over them thank you for watching this video let me know what you think uh I wish you all the best wife painting and uh I'll see you in the next video

Channel: FuuujinVRC

Views: 283

Keywords: vrchat, weight, painting, basic, blender, weightpainting, avatar, vr, chat, SDK, unity, tutorial

Id: q1CVidYqFzs

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2023