Intro to Character Rigging: Problem with mirroring weights.

[JeiWo]

Hi all, hopefully someone can help me out. I've been working through the Intro to Character Rigging tutorial, and everythings been going fine, but I ran into an issue on the second to last lesson. When I hit the Mirror Mode button, it only shows green vertices on the right, but no blue vertices on the left. I figured I messed up somewhere along the way, but even more confusingly, I opened the corresponding project file, which should be the same one used in the video, and still the blue vertices don't show up, so now I'm just not sure what's going on. Any ideas?

Googling didn't appear to give me much help. People suggested I need to reset XForms again, and I tried but perhaps I didn't do it right. It involved saving out the weight information, trashing the skin modifier, hitting the reset Xform button in the utilities, then put the skin modifier back on and reloading the weights. Didn't seem to help anything.

I can hit the "Paste Green to Blue Verts" button anyway, but frankly I can't tell if it worked or not. I seem to be running into another issue now, as I type, where if I adjust the arms so it bends (so I can check the weighting issues), and go back into Edit Envelope, the capsules aren't moving with the model, they stay where they were originally. Haven't had this problem all lesson, so I'm not sure if I just accidentally hit something or what. Any help?

Thanks.

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[delano]

Hey, JeiWo. Sorry to hearing you're running into some trouble. To answer your first question, I've checked those files and, unfortunately, I'm not having the same problem. Check under your "Mirror Parameters" rollout for "Display Projection". Double-check that it's set to "Default Display". If this is so, check to make sure your mesh's pivot is centered. If not, you may have to:

1. Save out your skin weights...
2. Delete the Skin modifier...
3. Center the pivot...
4. Reset the mesh's Xform and collapse it...
5. Add a new Skin modifier and load your weights in.

If the pivot is centered, check to make sure your "Mirror Offset" is set to 0 and "Mirror Thresh" parameter set to 0.5.

As for your second question, no need to worry. Envelope capsules will remain at your character's initial skin pose.

Hope this helps!

[JeiWo]

Hey Delano, thanks for the quick response (and sorry for the delayed response). Here's the results:

I tried following your steps, and unfortunately once again the blue verts never showed up. HOWEVER, after fiddling around with it, I realized that even though they blue verts weren't appearing on my screen, they were there. I could select these invisible blue verts, and the corresponding green vert would be hi-lighted, indicating that they are mirroring over. I went ahead and hit the transfer green to blue verts, and voila, it seemed to register. (I also realized that if you hit transfer green bones to blue, you don't have to readjust your bones like you showed in that lesson). Why the blue verts don't appear on my screen is a mystery to me, it must be some glitch or some broken setting somewhere. If you have any ideas please let me know, otherwise I'm just relieved in knowing that it still works properly and I can finish the tutorial.

Also, regarding the capsule thing, I was a little confused since you showed being able to bend his arm, work on the capsule when it's bent, then return it back. Then I realized that if I do the Auto Key method, moving it on a different frame, it works that way. So yeah, thanks for helping clear up some of the confusion, I thought I had messed something up somewhere.

[delano]

Hey, JeiWo! Glad you were able to figure out a workaround! That display problem your experiencing is very strange :( I'll look into it...

As for the envelope capsules, yes, you're correct that they will follow when your character is animated, but without animation, they stay at the character's skin pose.

Take care!