WeightPaint

Weight Painting -because slogan's are so last year!

Why would I need weight painting? Isn't messiah supposed to avoid all that?
Wow, a valid question right at the top! Yeah actually you don't _neeeeed_ weight painting. It's just another option for those who choose to use it. Generally a better approach in messiah is to use the default weights of bones combined with metaeffectors or some other kind of volume based weighting tool so you don't have to re-do anything if you replace your character model.

So what do you mean? I would have to re - do a weight paint if I replace my character?
Weight painting is dependant on point order. That means that if you change the point order of your character (eg. add a loop etc) the weights will no longer be correct. Messiah saves weights within the scene, not the object, so that's why this is seperate unlike some other applications. The cool thing is, that you can pick any method you choose.

Ok, I got that bit, but I still want to paint those weights, so how do I apply weight painting?
1. To add a weight painting tool to your scene, go to the Tools sub-tab in the Setup Tab.
2. Add a Weight Paint tool to your scene and add all the geometric objects to the weight list tab.
3. Switch to the weight paint list and click the paint button.
4, The left mouse button adds one increment of the weight up until the max weight per computation. The middle mouse button changes the radius of the brush. The right mouse button removes weight down to the minimum value of the brush.
5. Pick the weight you have made in your Bone's F3 sub tab 'Weight'.
6. Although it's not adviced, official or whatever you mgiht call it, you may use weight painting to place things like hair and other weightspot dependant weight based effects or surface qualities. We do not advice using metaeffectors for this because the computation for weightspot is almost equal to computing one effector per vertice of the object, eg. it's not very efficient yet. We're working on it but for now it's *possible*, but not *advisable* to use weight painting for weightspot dependandt calculations. (You may still use it for things like bone deform without a performance hit).

Why did you put it in there if it wasn't going to be as fast for placing hair and doing render time weightspot calcs as the other system?
We put it in there because it is still useful for people who have decided that they're not going to change their model much and want to use a simpler weighting system. We're also working on improving the speed of the weightspot calculation so all is not lost. Personally, as the author of the code, I would avoid it for heavy production in it's current state because it has not had anywhere near the production proven time of the other weight tools. At the moment I think it would hold up for advertisement but not film and other long form work. For that you are better off using the traditional adaptive volume weights in messiah.