How to weight paint clothing in Blender

A weight says how much one bone moves one vertex: 0 is not at all (blue), 1 is completely (red). Good clothing weights are smooth gradients between neighbouring bones.

What you need

• Blender
• A garment already parented to an armature

Steps

1. Enter Weight Paint mode properly. Select the armature, then shift-select the garment and switch to Weight Paint mode. Now you can click a bone to paint its weights and rotate it to test.
2. Turn on Auto Normalize. In the tool options enable Auto Normalize, so the weights on every vertex always add up to 1 while you paint.
3. Use few brushes. Add and Subtract at low strength for building, Blur for softening. The Smooth operator (Weights > Smooth) evens out a whole area at once.
4. Work joint by joint. Bend one joint, look at the fold, repair, straighten, go to the next. Shoulders and hips need the widest, softest gradients.
5. Mirror. If the garment is symmetrical, paint one side with X mirror on, or mirror the vertex groups afterwards.
6. Limit and clean. Finish with Limit Total (4) and Normalize All before exporting to Second Life.

Tips

• Paint with the wireframe overlay on so you see which vertices you touch.
• Thick garments: give the inside and outside faces the same weights, or the layers slide through each other.
• If something collapses to a point, a vertex has lost all its weights - give it some from its neighbours.

Next

• How to transfer weights from a body to clothing in Blender
• How to fix clipping in Second Life mesh clothing

Words you do not know? See the glossary. All guides: how-to guides.

This page is a written overview. In the SL Designers video courses you watch clothing being made from start to finish, and our Blender addons take over much of the technical work.