Build advanced skeleton adds extra bones?

[pathin37]

Just wondering why my advanced skeleton insists on making a dozen extra bones after i complete half and then select "build advanced skeleton" when it completes the rest of the model it forms entire arm bones and leg bones into 10 little ones instead of my original design... any reason why?:)

[Kahylan]

Hi!

Those are called "twist joints" or "roll joints". You can ajust the number of them by selecting the standin joints that you use to place your skeleton. The shoulder, lower arm, thigh and shin should have a "Twist Joints" attribute on them, if you set that attribute to 0 it won't create extra joints when you build your skeleton.

Same goes for the "Inbetween joints" attribute on your spine and neck joints by the way.

But, twist joints like this are acutally a really useful feature in rigs, they are there to smooth out the skin weights along the main joint axis along the length of the arm/leg, so you don't get an undesired "candywrapper" effect when the animator twists the wrist more than 90 degrees. Unless you are rigging a roboter, I would keep atleast two twist joints in the upper and lower arm/leg.

I hope it helps

[pathin37]

Hi again. Thank u so much and yes I reloaded they are indeed useful and pushed forward. On another note.. while I have your attention! I was wondering if you have any advice on how to fix glitching during painting weights??

Basically just my fingers are causing issues. I used advanced skeleton and everything is perfect I love it, except my fingers have areas that refuse to let me I paint them.. they insist on staying white, or other areas when I paint them vertexes glitch and freak out and end up 10 feet away from my model! Any tips? 🙂 I’ve searched but haven’t found much on that particular issue or what is causing it… I tried manually moving vertex back to place but then when I move my finger or hand around the vertex doesn’t move as it should and frays away from the model as it moves lol

[Kahylan]

Glitching klike you are describin it can have multiple causes, and I can't really tell you what exactly it is in your case.

Its most often caused by unclean geometry, for example edges that overlap but aren't merged, edges with 0 length, faces that share all vertices, etc. Things like this should be fixed by using the Mesh-> Cleanup... command before you start rigging.

That faces refuse to be painted is something that doesn't really happen, mostly it is a problem of the vertices not being where you see them because you are in smooth mesh preview. the hit detection of the paint weights brush always looks for where the geometry really is, not where it is displayed. If you are zoomed in very close, like with fingers, that can mean that the true position of the vertex isn't on screen therefore it can't be painted...

For things like this, I like to do something called weight flooding, you switch to selection mode in your paint weights tool, select the vertices in question, then you switch back to paint mode input the strenght you  need your joint to influence the vertex in and use the "Flood" button below the weight input settings.

Now if your weight returns back as soon as you select another influence, that mostlikely means that the influence you just worked on was locked in the paint weights tool.

That your vertices glitch out from their position and don't move means they don't have any weights on them anymore. This means your skincluster isn't normalizing correctly, which most likely also stems from some uncleanness in the mesh. But this can also happen in meshes that are totally fine. What normally helps is, selecting the vertices that glitched out and using the Skin-> Hammer Skin Weights command, this command looks at the vertices next to the selection and tries to average out the skinweights on the selection accordingly. It normally does a pretty good job.

I hope it helps!