Category:Moviestorm Modding -> 3D Modeling -> Blender

Weighting Bodyparts in Blender

Unlike animated props, where you will want to weight your mesh to your skeleton - with bodyparts we don’t have an accurate skeleton.  So for the Blender exporter I have added the ability to weight from the vertex groups instead of the bones.  It uses the first 3 characters of the vertex group as the bone index.  So, for example, if you wanted to weight an accessory entirely to the female head, you would just create a vertex group of 015_Head and assign all the verticies to it. 
See the two puppet skeleton articles for bone ID info:
Female01 Skeleton
Male01 Skeleton

1.) Select the mesh you are going to weight.
2.) Switch to Edit mode (Tab-Key)
3.) Open the Editing Panels (F9-Key)
4.) In the ‘Link and Materials’ panel, under the ‘Vertex Groups’ heading, click the ‘New’ button.
5.) In the new name select box that appears, change ‘Group’ to the name you want to weight to (e.g. ‘015_Head’ for female head).
6.) Click the ‘Assign’ button to weight all currently selected Verticies to this group, weighted as shown in the ‘Weight’ control.
7.) Repeat as needed.

Advanced Techniques
1.) In Object mode, select the mesh you want to weight.
2.) Switch to Weight Paint mode.
3.) Open the Editing Panels (F9-Key)
4.) In the ‘Link and Materials’ panel, under the ‘Vertex Groups’ heading, select your group, or click the ‘New’ button and name the group appropriatley.
5.) With your mouse in the 3D window, use the N-Key to open the Weight Paint Properties.  Here you can select the weight you wish to apply for the current vertex group.
6.) Use the mouse to apply the current group to your verticies.  The weight will show as a color from dark blue (zero) to red (one).