Weight painting selected faces

[Anonymous]

Hello Maya Forums, familiar with weight painting but one thing I believe I could do in Cinema 4D and cannot figure out in Maya is how to select faces on a mesh and flood just those faces for a particular joint. The workflow I'm trying to do is flood the root with 100% influence and then go through each joint, selecting faces for those joints and then flooding them with influence. Painting the weights works in most cases but for very lowpoly models or with many joints close together it would be easier and more precise to just select face loops and then give 100% influence to a certain joint, then later I could worry about smoothing between joints. If anyone knows a way to do this I would appreciate it!

[kirbysteele · Accepted solution]

Hello GlobalKrampus,

I believe the thing you're looking for is the select mode of the weight painting tool. The two modes are paint mode and select mode and by default the weight paint tool is set to paint mode. If you right click the model when the paint tool is active, then you can select this mode on the radial menu or you can activate the radio button located below the joint list in the tool window for the paint weights. Once in this mode you can choose verts, faces or edges by right clicking on the mesh similar to how you activate different components while modeling. Now that you have picked what component you want to select you can select the desired faces and the joint you want to affect them and then dial up or down the influence slider in the tool window to flood the affected face with influence from the selected joint.

I really like working in this mode for weight painting a lot more than using the brush because of the exact control. Also selecting edge rings on the legs, arms and fingers and flooding influence really speeds things up! Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the explanation. Paint select is helpful, but it looks like Select mode was specifically what I was looking for. I had some confusion because I was trying to press Q to go back to the select tool to select my faces. In addition once I selected my faces I tried going back to Paint mode in the Paint Skin Weights Tool to flood the faces which resets the selection.

To anyone who finds this post the process for Select mode is:

• Select the Paint Skin Weights Tool and in the tool settings choose Select mode either via the button in the Paint Skin Weights Tool or RMB on the mesh> Select
• By default it lets you select vertices, to choose faces RMB>Face
• You can now select faces and face loops as usual (select a face, shift double click a neighboring face), even grow and shrink selections (shift + < or shift + >)
• Once faces are selected, select the joint you want to influence them in the Paint Skin Weights Tool list, then select the opacity and value and hit flood to flood the joint. There will be no visual indicator like in paint mode, but you can go back to paint mode to see the results

Thanks again for your help!