Proportional Edit / Sizing Workflow??

[Deezy Abruzzo]

OK so i made my first pair of shorts. Simple no frills. Now I want to size it to the standard shapes. I think i have gotten the grasp of proportional editing but, it screws up my weight painting.  Do I bone weight copy and  weight paint each size individually or is there an easier way?

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

This is going to be a bit longer but its a bigger subject so lets go into that..

Okay, there are some things you need to understand first in order to know why the proportional editing will kinda mess with a weighting that would have worked on the former not scaled / edited mesh. And to know why you most likely always will have to do some new weighting or at least editing for each size of your shorts.

- edgeflow : edgeflow describes edgeloops and their orientation / flow around the model (this here is a good example to see certain edgeflows on a face. http://tiruspage.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/edgeflow.jpg .The same of course goes for other parts on the body. (knees, elbows, neck etc) you always want to keep your mesh's structure and its edgeflow very close to the underlying model (the avatar wearing it in your case) in order to make it work when being moved with that model and animated. Or they will move very differently and have results even  extensive weight-editing can't really fix.

- Now this effects you in several ways when it comes to different 'sizes' of your shorts.
* lets say you want to make a 'longer version'  so you move in a proportional manner to keep the face-distribution evenly the legs further down. Of course now you will have an issue with your former weighting. Because Vertices inside of the loops / the mesh) now sit on different locations and will need a different weighting. Lets say an edgeloop (or a few vertices) that have been before above the knee are now below the knee.. this means of course you have to re-edit their weights now and assign them to the knee and decrease the weight they had from the leg above.

-  Also you should keep in mind that just proportionally moving / or moving parts into new spots won't be always the right solution. In some cases you will need to actually add more / new faces in order to keep the mesh evenly distributed and to have a certain density of edgeloops around bending parts like knees etc and not i.e.. A long row of very big faces which simply can't behave correctly on such a spot.

Mentioning all this should make you see that there is no 'one way solution' and you always will have to retouch the weighting or even completely overwork it for every changed version of your mesh.

I wouldn't go as far as copying the weights always new for each size when just  certain areas are changing and you can simply fix it by overworking the weights in these areas and leave the others untouched. 

Cases where it can work still with the old weights is all the parts that do not really move their position in a different size of the shorts. Like let's say when you just scale the edgeloops around the hips wider. Without moving them out of their Z-Position (conform scaling - stays in place and just gets 'wider' without changing height- in blender that is i.e.. ALT+S) - in those cases the former weighting should still work fine.
But as soon as adjacent vertices / loops / faces start moving out of their former positions a retouch on the weighting is needed for sure.

Also boneweight copy is always just a 'starting point' it will never be 100 % precise. (especially depending on how different your mesh's topology is from the one you copied the weights from) and often need intense editing until it behaves correctly. Weighting is after all an own artform as you will hear a lot 3D artists say : )

Hope this helped you a bit. Greetings, Code

[Coby Foden]

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Codewarrior Congrejo wrote:

- edgeflow : edgeflow describes edgeloops and their orientation / flow around the model (this here is a good example to see certain edgeflows on a face. 

http://tiruspage.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/edgeflow.jpg.

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You have extra dot at the end of the link (so it does not work).  Here's the correct link:

http://tiruspage.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/edgeflow.jpg

[Deezy Abruzzo]

Codewarrior,

Thank you so much for your input. I will work on my skills... Now new problems arise.....

Posting a new thread ; \

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

thankies Coby. that mean little period just slipped away there ; ) (edited link in original post)

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

You are very welcome =) (and answered your new post again - hopefully in a helpful way once more)

[Deezy Abruzzo]

Rehashing an old subject. I am finally to the resizing stage after going through all the creating aspects. Im wondering what work flow is best for sizing. 

Should I import a standard shape into my clothing model scene or export my model into a rigged standard size scene i have set up. It seems like i run into problems either way.  When i export/import into a scene the model and shape lose there weighting.  I guess I'm doing it wrong.