Bone Weight Copy is a Blender Addon for copying WEights from one Character to another. The tool was originaly introduced with Blender 2.49, but meanwhile it has been ported to Blender 2.5 Since Blender 2.66 it no longer works.

Important: Blender 2.66 has its own Bone weight Copy You find it within the Weight Paint tool Shel.

History

  • Luke Hares has written a BoneWeight Copy script for Blender-2.59 and posted it on blenderartists.org I found a potential bug which can cause that the initialised attributes may be lost during a blender session. When that happens, the script will get unusable and yield some errors about “BWC… not found”.
  • I fixed that problem and added some more functionality to that script for our SL issues which otherwise might cause problems (like missing bones) or copy “unneeded” data (like Morph shapes).
  • You can download the modified script from our download server: space_view3d_copy_bone_weight_enhanced.py (Hint: Use right mouse click -> save as …, use any file name with extension “.py” like for example: space_view3d_bwce.py )

History:

 

  • 18-jan-2012: fixed compatibility issue with Blender 2.62
  • 02-Sep-2011: Added extra features
  • 31-aug-2011:Fixed Compatibility issue with Blender 2.59

Installation

  
  1. Get Blender 2.60, 2.61, or 2.62
  2. Download the Bone Weight Cop script (see above)
  3. start a fresh Blender (to default start screen)
  4. Open User preferences
  5. Switch to the AddOns Tab
  6. Install addon … locate your sript file.
  7. Enable the check mark on the right.
  8. Save As Default
  • Now you find Bone Weight Copy in the Tool Shelf, whenever you have selected an Object which has weighted vertex groups.
  • Hint: The Copy Bone Weight Script is not distributed with Blender itself. But you can always get it from one of the links above (note: it works only for Blender 2.59 and newer)

Usage

  • Ensure that your Model (the target) and the model from where you want to copy the weights (the source) are both visible.
  • Select your model (the target)
  • Go to edit mode and select all vertices which shall be weighted (in most cases all vertices)
  • Go to Object mode
  • Use SHIFT + RMB to add the Source (From where the weights shall be copied) to the selection.
    Now both meshes (source and target) are selected
  • In the weight copy panel select Interpolation: 2 and check both options (“Only Named Bones” and “Copy Empty Groups”
  • Copy Bone Weights

Copy from multiple targets

Many example files for OpenSim and compatible online worlds use a Character with three separated parts (head, upper body, lower body). You can do a weight copy from those characters as follows:

Copy the Head part:

  • Select your target mesh and enter edit mode
  • Select only the vertices of the head part
  • Now go to object mode, Use SHIFT + RMB to add the head of the source mesh.
  • In the weight copy panel select Interpolation: 2 and check both options (“Only Named Bones” and “Copy Empty Groups”

Proceed in the same way with the upper body:

  • Select your target mesh and enter edit mode
  • Select only the vertices of the upper body part
  • Now go to object mode, Use SHIFT + RMB to add the upper body of the source mesh.
  • In the weight copy panel select Interpolation: 2 and check both options (“Only Named Bones” and “Copy Empty Groups”

And finally do it again for the lower body in exactly the same way:

  • Select your target mesh and enter edit mode
  • Select only the vertices of the lower body part
  • Now go to object mode, Use SHIFT + RMB to add the lower body of the source mesh.
  • In the weight copy panel select Interpolation: 2 and check both options (“Only Named Bones” and “Copy Empty Groups”

Now your target object should be weighted.

The control Parameters

  
  • Interpolation:
    When > 0 tries to find better matching weights by subdividing the meshes (the interpolation value is the number of subdivisions used for the interpolation) and thus having more accurate surface matching.
  • Only Named Bones:
    When checked, only those weight groups get copied for which the armature has bones. For avatar.blend that means, only the weights for the bones are copied. All weights in the morph groups are ignored. Note that empty groups will not be copied (see next feature)
  • Copy empty Groups:
    When checked, also empty weight groups will be created on the target object(s).

Hint for mesh makers

If you use avatar.blend or any skeleton which defines the vertext groups for the default Morph shapes, then you may want to check “Only Named Bones” this ensures, that the target object will get only the bone’s weight groups.

Import issues?

If you can not upload your mesh, then this may be caused by not having defined weight groups for all bones in your object.If your source object can be imported to your online world, but your target object can not, then you will want to check “Copy empty Groups” because that will ensure that all weight groups for all bones are transfered to the target object.

Feedback

Please send any feedback, if it does not work or behaves wrong.Many thanks to all involved people who have helped me to get this done so quickly.

Have fun,
Gaia

Thanks

Special thanks to the original script author (Luke Hares) and to Domino Marama, who has helped me to jump start into blender-2.5 GUI programming. And many thanks to the Blender developers on the Blender IRC.