Need help with Rigging Weights (Armpits area)

[Mariano Ree]

So I have been messing with the weights around the armpit area on a mesh sweater. Can't seem to figure out how other peoples meshs make the armpit area look so smooth. Is my weighting wrong or is there another way to do it?

I took some photos of the section I'm having problems with hopefully someone can help.

 

[Gaia Clary]

That looks like you have used the "Copy weights from default Avatar" method to get your weights ? This normaly gives you a reasonable initial weighting of your model. However that needs manual improvement in almost any case. So you need to enter Weight paint mode and get fun with that. My experience with weighting is that i needed a long time to get the feel for how to work with it. At the end its an art by itself.

Some guesses:

From your pictures it looks like the transitions of the weights are too sharp. So smoothing the transition (from red to blue) should give you improvement.

I also have the impression that the collar bone is either bended too much or it is too short for that mesh. So you might want to edit the bone length (and export the skeleton along with the mesh to collada, and enable "with joints" during importing the mesh to SL).

Please also note that your mesh is very dense. Although this might look like a great idea, it often also leads to a lot of extra work to get the weights done right.

[Mariano Ree]

Hey Gia thnx for the reply.

So after hours of messing around with the weights on the bending area of the shoulder. I got nowhere.

I took your input about the mesh being to dense and made a simpler mesh just for the weighting. It definitely made weight painting easier. I stopped using the "Copy weights from default Avatar". It just kept giving me the problem I had above with the bending. Instead on the simple mesh I used the Automatic weights of the Armature deform. This weight gave me the nice smooth bend I was looking for around the armpit area. With out all the hair pulling and going crazy. I then tuned the weights on my own to get it just how I wanted. Once I finished with the weight painting I copied those over to the more Detailed Mesh.

 

I have no idea if the collar bone mesh is to short for my AV mesh. I just used the bones that came with the workbench from the tutorials I have been reading. Non of them said anything about adjusting bones or how to do that. What will adjusting the bone do?