Vertex weighting using boxes

This time, I'll use something called a "vertex weight box" to associate vertices and bones in the model. The model uses "Deruderu.mqo" in the "Sample" folder.

After importing the model data, create a bone. Before creating, press F3 to look straight ahead, and then press the backlight button on the toolbar. This darkens the model and makes the bones more visible.

Create a bone. First, click four times from the bottom to create a bone.

The top is the hair bone in the center, the middle is the bone for adjusting the position, and the bottom is the bone of the main body. More on that later.

Next, create bones that go to the sides. Since it branches from the bone of the main body, click the joint at the end of the bone of the main body as shown in the figure on the right to make it the parent of the next bone. The selected bone turns white.

Once selected, create two bones as shown on the right. The first bone is for position adjustment, and the second is the right hair bone.

The same is true for the other side, selecting the parent bone and creating two bones. This completes the creation of bones, so please switch to edit mode.

Leave the name of the bone as shown below.

Well, I created a bone, but among the bones I created, there are bones that are not needed for animation. It is the "bone for position adjustment" in the figure below. It is only used to align the shafts of the hair bones.

This bone is turned into a "floating bone". Floating bones help reduce the weight of the data because they don't count as animation bones. First, click the bone you want to make a floating bone in the view or select it in the tree view of the Properties panel.

Once selected, click Bone Settings on the left side of the window. Then, the bone setting panel will be displayed, so change the "Bone type" to "Floating bone".

You can see that the bones in the view turn red and have changed. The icons in the tree view also change. Change this to three bones. This concludes Bone.

Next, set the vertex weight. You can animate it with just the bone configuration, but I don't think it works well and intentionally with the automatic setting, so I specify it explicitly (although it has some interesting movements).

First, select Vertex Weight from the Properties panel tab.

To associate vertices with bones, use something called a vertex weight box. Associate the vertices enclosed in this box with the bones.

Since we are going to create that box, click the "Create" button from the toolbar. This will switch to box creation mode.

First, associate the vertices and bones of the body. In this case, select a vertex in the model to create a box around it. When you enter create mode and click Create Box at the bottom right of the window, the box creation dialog will be displayed, so check "Model vertex selection" in it.

Next, we will create a box for the main unit, so select "Body" from the bone configuration at the bottom of the properties panel. This will automatically associate the box you created with the bones of your console.

After selecting the bones, select the vertices of the model. To select vertices, drag the view with the mouse to display a rectangular range so that vertices within that range are selected. The selected vertices turn green.

However, if you leave it like this, you may want to select only the main body, but other extra vertices may also be selected, so in this case, use selection locking. First, press the "Object List" button on the right side of the window to display the object list.

The object list has an item for each object, so check the second box for the object you don't want to select. The vertices of the object are then locked and cannot be selected.

Once you have locked everything except the Body and Eyes, drag the view around the entire model. You can see that only unlocked objects are selected.

Then, press the "Create" button in the box creation dialog. This creates a box on the view.

The vertices enclosed by the box are now associated with the "body" bones. However, if you look closely, you can see that the unrelated vertices are also surrounded, so you need to make sure that the box is not applied to these vertices.

The box you just created is displayed in the box list of the Properties panel, so select it.

And if you look at the object list earlier, there is one more check item, so remove the second check "B" from the items other than "body" and "eye". (Depending on the lock state, it may be like the right from the beginning) This ensures that the box is applied only to objects marked B.

This concludes the console association. The same method is used for other objects. Next, we will associate the vertices of the "middle hair", so select the bones.

Lock the model and select the vertices.

It then creates a box and specifies the object to which the box applies. This is the end of the middle hair. Make the hairs at the ends as well.

This concludes the vertex weight. After that, you can animate it to your liking.