Paint Wire Weights Tool

With the Paint Wire Weights Tool, you can now use an Artisan brush to apply, distribute, and remove wire weights on your target objects.

This tool is useful because it lets you set your wire weights in a free-form manner, allowing you to create nonuniform and nonsymmetrical deformation effects.

When you paint wire weights, you can also Import or export wire weight maps. See Manage wire weight maps.

Paint Wire Weights Tool settings

For descriptions of the Paint Wire Weights Tool options common to all Artisan tools, see Artisan Tool Settings in the Artisan guide.

Paint Attributes

Wire Deformer Selection

wiren.weights: Displays the name of the wire deformer node for the surface you have selected to paint and the attribute (weights) you are painting. To select another wire to paint on this surface, click this button and select the appropriate wire weights name. By default, the tool selects the first wire it detects on the selected surface (for example, wire1.weights).
Filter: wire: Sets a filter so that only wire nodes display in the menu for the button above this one. You are painting weights with the Paint Wire Weights Tool, so you do not need to change this filter.

Paint Operation

The paint operations define how your wire weights are applied to the target shape.

Replace: Your brush stroke replaces the target weights with the wire weight set for the brush.
Add: Your brush stroke adds the target weights to the wire weight set for the brush.
Scale: Your brush stroke scales the target weights by the wire weight factor set for the brush.
Smooth: Your brush stroke averages the weights of adjacent vertices to produce a smoother transition between wire weights.

Value: Sets the wire weight value to apply when you perform any of the painting operations.
Min/Max Value: Sets the minimum and maximum possible weight values. By default, you can paint weight values between 0 and 1. Setting Min/Max Value can extend or narrow the range of values. Negative values are useful for subtracting weight. For example, if you set Min Value to -1, Value to -0.5, and select Add for the operation, you would subtract 0.5 from the weight of vertices you paint. Positive values are used as multipliers.

TipTo help you differentiate paint values when you paint with ranges greater than 0 to 1 (for example, -5 to 5), and to maximize the range of values that display when you paint values with ranges between 0 to 1 (for example, 0.2 to 0.8), set Min Color and Max Color (in the Display section) to correspond with the Min/Max values.

Clamp

Select whether you want to clamp the values within a specified range, regardless of the Value set when you paint.

Upper: Turn this on to clamp the upper value to the Clamp Value specified below. For example, if you clamp Upper, set the upper Clamp Value to 0.75, and set Value to 1, the weights you paint will never be greater than 0.75.
Lower: Turn this on to clamp the lower value to the Clamp Value specified below. For example, if you clamp Lower and set the lower Clamp Value to 0.5, the weights you paint will never be less than 0.5, even if you set the Value to 0.25.

Clamp Values: Set the Lower and Upper values for clamping.
Flood: Click Flood to apply the brush settings to all the weights on the target shape. The result depends on the brush settings defined when you perform the flood. See Flood paint in the Artisan guide.
Vector index: If you are painting a three channel attribute (RGB or XYZ), select the channel you want to paint. The wire deformer weight is a single channel attribute, therefore you do not need to change this setting.