Rigging and Skinning - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 153

up with its own deformation solution for the whole mesh, then blends that with the Mesh Deform modifi er's
result based on the defblend vertex group. Figure 9.46 shows the defblend vertex group in Weight Paint mode.
NOTE
In this example, the defblend vertex group has been painted so that the heaviest weight (the
highest value: 1) is on the lower arms and hands. This is actually the opposite of what we want
because the highest weight is used for the fi rst modifi er's result, and the lowest weight is used
for the second result. Blender allows you to easily toggle this behavior, though, with the Inv
button that appears beside the Group: fi eld. Enabling Inv switches this relationship so that a
weight of 1 signals the second modifi er's result, and a weight of 0 signals the fi rst. So why did
I paint it backwards to begin with? The vertex group was originally created for something else,
and worked well enough for this that I didn't bother to change it.
Figure 9.46 The Weight Paint visualization of the “defblend” vertex group
Of course, if the deformations produced by both modifi ers are radically different, there will be distortion
or very poor deformation within the transition areas. For that reason, it is to your advantage to try to make
sure that the areas of the mesh where a transition occurs from one modifi er's result to the other have a high
degree of congruency between the two methods of deformation.
For now, you are limited to using the MultiModifi er tool with the Armature deformer. If you want to use
multiple modifi ers for deformation without the MultiModifi er tool, you can still do so by carefully using
vertex groups to control the effects of each modifi er in the stack, but achieving a pleasing, smoothly blended
result is signifi cantly more diffi cult. For now, it is best to use the modifi er stack as shown in this section.