Rigging shoes for slink feet

[CadenzaInVivace]

I'm trying to rig my first pair of shoes for Slink feet in Blender. Since I don't want the shoes to morph at all, as with any shoe, and only want the rigging so it stays locked to the feet bones, I erased all the weight manually from each bone in the feet. But when I tried to export it it threw an error saying that at least 1 vertice needs to have some weight for each bone. So what is the correct way of doing this? Yes I want it rigged because I prefer using 1 attachment, not 2 unrigged attachments.

[Medhue Simoni]

I don't have much experience rigging for these special feet, or whatever, but the basics of rigging is still the same. You need those weights. The feet, whether rigging for classic weight or fitted weights, have no morphing bones, so they don't morph. At least, this is my observation from rigging full avatars. Technically, the feet should be affect by size, in the slider, but for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to work. These are just my impressions, so maybe someone with more experience with these feet will comment.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

If there are no weights, there is no rigging. It's as simpe as that.

If you want the rigged shoes to keep their shape while the avatar is animated, you need to make sure every single vertice in the shoe has the same weight. So the weights for the left shoe will be 1.0 to the left foot bone, the weights for the right shoe will be 1.0 to the right foot bone.

How to do that in Blender I don't know, I use another program.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

How to do that in Blender I don't know, I use another program.

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In Blender, it is quite easy to transfer weights, especially if the person has the Avastar addon. SLink should have a model of their feet with weights on them that the user can transfer weights from. I actually sell a bodysuit with a set of weights for classic weighting, and fitted mesh weighting for the whole avatar, but they aren't optimized for Slink. I'm actually floored by how many people have purchased it.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

The OP doesn't want the shoes to deform at all, transferring the weights will certainly not accomplish this. Since you're here, maybe you could tell how to set all the verts to 1.0 in Blender...

[Gaia Clary]

Prepare:

1. Select your mesh in edit mode
2. in the Data properties section open the "Vertex Groups panel
3. Delete all vertex groups from the panel except mAnkleLeft and mAnkleRight
4. if mAnkleRight/Left weight groups do not yet exist, create them now in the vertex group panel.

The right shoe:

1. In the vertex group panel select the mAnkleRight vertex group
2. Select all vertices of the right shoe
3. In the vertex group panel: Assign a weight of 1.0 to all selected verts

The left shoe:

1. In the vertex group panel select the mAnkleLeft vertex group
2. Now select all vertices of the left shoe
3. In the vertex group panel: Assign a weight of 1.0 to all selected verts

Now the shoes are following the Ankle Bones

However i am not sure why someone would want to do that.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

 

However i am not sure why someone would want to do that.

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That's exactly my thought. If this is what they want, then why not just attach the shoes to the feet in SL?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Gaia Clary wrote:

 

However i am not sure why someone would want to do that.

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Apparently because the OP prefers a single attachment over two seperate ones, that way you can save an attachment point and possibly a (very small) script. Personally I'd go with unrigged mesh as well for editability.

I wonder if rigged mesh (done this way) has a negative impact on performance, compared to unrigged mesh.

[Ssmiles]

I relize this is a bit of an old thread but what Kwakkelde Kwak said is likely the reason as that's how it's being done now.  Instead of attaching two shoes like in the the good old days, the newer mesh feet such as in Slink, TMP, and N-Core have incorporated both shoes into one attachment when using mesh feet.