Avastar and bone vertex groups

[ayamashi]

Hello,

I am trying to weight something and after fiddling around with it I realised I can select a bone and then select vertex group in edit mode and it will show me all vertices affected.

I have tried to manually deselect all vertices which should not be affected by a bone, but how do you preserve this? After I exit edit mode, the vertices get reselected. If I hit assign, the mesh will break.

Do people even do this when weight painting? Do people check in edit mode which vertices are affected by weights? Am I doing something completely pointless?

As you can see on the picture I have mShoulderLeft bone selected. Vertices on the completely other side of the mesh are also selected. Any way to make it clean, deselect the vertices on the right side and middle side? The vertices on the right side do not have any weights from mShoulderLeft.

Edited February 27, 2020 by ayamashi

[Ada Radius]

Yes, stuff goes wrong all the time while weighting and you might have to do some cleanup. There some choices.

• Find the setting for Clean (Sorry I'm in Blender 2.8 now and can't remember where it is in 2.79) Weights > Clean will clear out any vertices that have an assignment to that vertex group but no zero weights - you can set the threshold.
• Another is, in Weight Paint Mode, to go into Vertex mask mode (one of the buttons at the bottom of the 3D viewer). That will open more buttons under your vertex groups, including a Select button. You can select all the verts assigned to that group there as well as the method you discovered. Then use your Weight Paint brush on Subtract 100% to paint out the ones you don't want. Then do Weights > Clean again.
• Another way, (better once you get used to all your options, as it's easy to mess up), is to copy the weights from the opposite bone. There's an explanation here: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/16504/is-there-any-way-to-copy-the-weight-of-one-bone-over-to-anotherforgot-to-use-x
• Another way, if you don't care about your UV maps because you're going to redo them anyway, is to select the weights for both L and R bones and (Edit Mode) hit Symmetrize, then select which side copies to which. +X to -X, probably, in your case. You'll see it better after you do Weights > Clean. 

[ayamashi]

Thank you! I was using the 2nd method you mentioned but I did not use the substract tool on vertices I wanted to remove from the group (they appeared blue, thought they are not affected).

After I did what you mentioned and using Weights - Clean and then reselecting the vertex group, the random vertices are removed from the selected group.

@Ada Radius