Senior Technical Artist in the games industry Matt Stoneham with a post on the issues that arise when painting skin weights on hair and fur cards while manually painting these can be very time consuming especially if there are tons of them. TD Matt looks at some tools he created in Maya that automatically skins hair planes based on an underling mesh, and ensures that each vertex in a single hair segment has unified skin weight values to preserve (as much as possible) the shape and volume of each piece as it deforms. Check out the Automatic hair/fur plane skin weighting article here.
“The problem is how to paint our weights on the hair elements. Attempting to manually paint weights on these kinds of meshes is extremely time consuming and often near impossible where there are lots of closely overlapping pieces (this example mesh isn’t at all representative of the complexity that would be usual in our in game models).Then there is also the problem of operations such as flooding smooth not crossing mesh boundaries even if the planes are combined into a single poly. So in short, for a number of reasons, painting weights on this kind of thing is a total arse.”
