Keep Armature when entering Weight Painting
What is the point of requiring to select armature and the mesh when entering Weight Painting for Skinning or anything? Since armature can have separate bones, barely there will be multiple armatures assigned to 1 mesh, and even if would, it would be more ergonomic to just keep them all shown and interactable, so user would disable their visibility if needed, though Outliner for example .
2 Comments
Yes, that should be improved at some point... I call that the 'Mixed' Pose/Weight Paint Mode for Rigging in Blender. Although it makes sense logically for the UI, that we need to have, in a Multi-Selection, both the Parent Armature Object and its Child Mesh Object, in order to be able to Pose the Armature Bones at the same time as to be able to Weight Paint the Mesh Vertex Groups (whatever the nature of such Vertex Groups). However, in practical terms, that is far from optimal, and also lacks versatility.
I think, ideally, the regular Weight Paint Mode should be 'integrated' with the 'Mixed' Pose/Weight Paint Mode. So, as soon as we get into Weight Paint Mode, we could, for example, immediately shift from one setup to another (sort of an Enable/Disable 'Mixed' Pose Mode. It could be like an Option (or Radio Button) in the Header on Weight Paint Mode, something like: "Enable/Disable Posing". When this feature is Enabled (I guess only available if there exist a valid Parenting Relation [in principle: Set Parent To Armature Deform]), any Visible Bone that is part of the Parent Armature Object, would become Selectable and Poseable on Weight Paint Mode, just as it already happens for the 'Mixed' Pose/Weight Paint Mode. So, it would be like a mechanism that will Toggle on/off Pose Mode while on Weight Paint Mode, meaning the way we enter on Weight Paint Mode wouldn't matter anymore.
And certainly you're not the only one nor the first to observe the current UI's limitation. If even Blender Rigging experts, such as Dzadik in this video, says he uses Scripting to improve the UI favoring Weight Painting exactly on that matter: youtube.com/watch
It isn't a requirement. It's just an optional thing you can do, so to be able to select the bones and switch to their corresponding weights.
But Weight Painting isn't only for bone weights, there are many things vertex groups can be used for. Hence, it is up to the user to chose to enter weight paint mode with or without armatures.