One thing I have always struggled with in Cinema 4D is adding additional geometry, like cloths (I do not mean a Cinema 4D cloth object) to an already fully rigged, morphed and weighted character.
Most of these characters come from DAZ-3D and iClone which does a good job of transferring the character’s body weights over to the cloths.
I’ve tried using Cinema 4D VAMP tool and Weights Manager, but they don’t come close to matching the original cloths weights created by the other software.
Over the weekend, I figured a way to transfer the exact weights, though a one drawback. First what I did.
I opened the modified character with the extra added closed I exported as a FBX file.
Then I selected just the cloth item I want to add and click on the weight tag. (Image Step 1)
For each joint that is being used for weights, I right click the joint and select “To Vertex Map” (Image Step 2)
Then I copy the cloths object and paste it into my main character project. Doing this removes the joints from the cloths objects weight tag, but the created vertex map tag names have the joint name.
Then I click on the cloths object weight tag and add all the joints from my main character for each vertex map tag and select the vertex map option and select the vertex map tag with the appropriate joint name. (Image Step 3)
Now the cloths object has perfect weights and matches the main characters body weights.
The drawback of this process is the cloths weight tag is now only a pointer to a bunch of individual vertex maps which cannot be edited as a single weight map. (Image Step 4)
Is there a way to merger all these vertex maps together into the weight tag?