Weights Menu

Reference

Mode:: Edit Mode
Menu:: Weights

This page covers many of the tools in the Weights menu.

Sample Weight

Reference

Mode:: Edit Mode
Menu:: Weights ‣ Sample Weight
Shortcut:: Shift-X

Adjust the Weight of the Draw tool to the weight of the vertex under the mouse cursor.

Normalize All

Reference

Mode:: Edit Mode
Menu:: Weights ‣ Normalize All

For each point, this tool makes sure that the sum of the weights across all vertex groups is equal to 1. It normalizes all of the vertex groups, except for locked groups, which keep their weight values untouched.

Lock Active: Keep the values of the active group while normalizing all the others.

Normalize

Reference

Mode:: Edit Mode
Menu:: Weights ‣ Normalize

This tool only works on the active vertex group. All points keep their relative weights, but the entire set of weights is scaled up such that the highest weight value is 1.0.

Invert

Reference

Mode:: Edit Mode
Menu:: Weights ‣ Invert

Replaces each weight of the selected vertex group by × -1.0 weight.

Examples:

Original 1.0 converts to 0.0
Original 0.5 remains 0.5
Original 0.0 converts to 1.0

Subset: Restrict the tool to a subset. See The Subset Option about how subsets are defined.
Add Weights: Add vertices that have no weight before inverting (these weights will all be set to 1.0).
Remove Weights: Remove vertices from the vertex group if they are 0.0 after inverting.

Smooth

Reference

Mode:: Edit Mode
Menu:: Weights ‣ Smooth

Smooths the weights of the active vertex group.

Generate Weights

Reference

Mode:: Edit Mode
Menu:: Weights ‣ Generate Weights

Generate automatic weight for armatures (requires an Armature modifier).

With Empty Group: When parenting it will create an empty vertex groups on the child objects (if they do not exist already) for and named after each deforming bone in the armature.
With Automatic Weights: Works similar to With Empty Groups, but it will not leave the vertex groups empty. It calculates how much influence a particular bone would have on points based on the distance from those points to a particular bone (“bone heat” algorithm). This influence will be assigned as weights in the vertex groups.