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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
Things are looking good so far. If you’ve painted weights in previous versions of CINEMA 4D using the Claude
Bonet tool, you’ll appreciate just how much effort the automatic weighting has saved us here. However, if you
now select the shoulder joint, there appears to be problem: almost all the geometry is weighted to this joint.
Also, the elbow joint has more geometry weighted to it than it should have. Both these joints are affecting
parts of the geometry they shouldn’t.
But don’t worry. The auto weighting is in fact working correctly. The reason is that we didn’t create a joint for
every part of the body. When we called the Bind function, it tried to auto weight the entire geometry using
just the four joints.
When animating characters you usually create a joint for each part of the body. After all, even if you just wanted
to wave an arm in the air you’d still expect some movement to come from the rest of the body. In most cases,
you‘ll want the function to weight the entire mesh. In the case of our simple arm, that‘s not what we want but
it gives us an opportunity to take a closer look at the Weight tool.
Like the old Claude Bonet tool, the Weight tool lets us paint weights onto our character’s geometry.
In the Object Manager, select the “shoulder” joint and choose Character/Weight Tool in the main menu. If
you deactivate the HyperNURBS, you’ll see the weighting appear in white and you can paint to add or remove
weighting. When you select the Weight tool, its settings appear in the Attribute Manager at the bottom
right.
Disable the “Visible Only” option and with Ctrl held down paint over the turtle’s white weighting in the editor.
Disabling this option lets you also paint weighting onto surfaces that are behind other surfaces and in real life
would be blocked from view.
Painting on black areas adds weighting. Painting with Ctrl held down subtracts weighting. Use the Weight tool
to adjust the weighting as shown in the next screenshot, paying close attention to the neck (you may find it
helpful to hide the head to get a better view of the neck).