Tips for weight painting dresses?

[zackissuper]

I'm using Blender, and I'd like to create more custom meshes for dresses, but I've been having a difficult time weight painting them. I thought that I would be able to create a new mesh that roughly follows an existing DOA outfit with a dress, and then weight transfer from the DOA costume to my custom mesh, but the results are almost always unacceptable in some way. For example:

 

 

Anyone have any tips for doing this type of weight painting on top of an existing bone structure for skirts and dresses?

[Seijin8]

What tools are you using?

[zackissuper]

Sorry, should have specified -- this is all blender.

[LGMODS]

If you try to follow skirt bones for weight paint your dress then a simple weight transfer could make the job if the dress you use as template is close to your dress (in shape and size).

If not, then you can manually weight paint it bone per bone but this is a bit annoying knowing dress can have over 100 bones.

Or, you can weight paint your dress with hips and uplegs group, you'll not have physic but at least your dress will follow legs correctly too if you make a good gradiant.

 

Another important thing, if the skirt bones container you are using are too much far from your dress position, you'll have to manually rescale those bone to fit your dress or in game it will be scretched, even with a good weight paint.

[zackissuper]

1 hour ago, LGMODS said:

Another important thing, if the skirt bones container you are using are too much far from your dress position, you'll have to manually rescale those bone to fit your dress or in game it will be scretched, even with a good weight paint.

So bones are movable? How do you export a change in bone structure?

[LGMODS]

First you need TMC Bone Tool, drag and drop your TMC and click on Export.

You have your armature as .tmcbone, now open Blender.

 

You'll need a script to import & export .tmcbone here, you can find all necessary thing for DOA - Blender here :

 

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/9zi2gt8dyllaj/doa5mod#mc91ipeghb8r6

 

Once you have all ready, in Blender open your extracted .tmcbone and load also your .TMC to see the model then you can position your bones at the correct place viewing the meshes.

When you are done with the bones places, select the full armature and export it as .tmcbone.

 

Open again TMC Bone Tool, drag and drop your .TMC and drop also the edited .tmcbone on the second line then save the model (always have a back up in case of mistake).

 

Your armature should be erasing the old one.

Now you need to weight paint your dress by weight paiting each part of the bone on the right vertex group with your desired % of weight paint.

More strong this is and more the physic will be heavy too (also depend of the .TMC container too).