722 opened this issue on Aug 01, 2011 · 272 posts
pjz99 posted Wed, 10 August 2011 at 8:44 AM
It's pretty nifty, you can take an already-rigged figure and convert specific joint/bend channels to a weight map. I'm pretty sure this is an extension of what Poser and D|S were already doing anyway (see the "calcWeights" commands in any old CR2) but now there's a user interface for it and a file format to store it in, instead of just calculating solely based on the falloff envelopes behind the scenes. You don't have to do it for an entire figure, you can just convert joint bends that really need it, e.g. only thigh bend.
There are also tools to automatically transfer weight maps onto a conformer; these work as well as you could expect. A nice perk is that the falloff regions that the weight map is initially derived from are retained, but disabled (the data for them is really tiny, whether in file or in memory). If you're doing a conformer, you can easily fall back to the falloff regions if that will turn out to be more practical than the automatic conversion transferred from the conform target.