Weight Painting Mirror X should be a global setting for all objects. In fact, enable mirrored X weight painting (which includes enabling Mirror Vertex Groups) by default, please, for the love of Morgan Freeman
Apologies for the rant, but I can't understand this section of the program and why it is the way it is for so many versions.
I have just lost hours of work because I didn't realize that the Mirror X in the Symmetry section of weight painting was disabled for every subsequent seperate object I was working on. I can understand some unique situations where someone has an asymmetrical character, but a high percentage of people have got to be doing mostly X axis symmetrical work most of the time.
If I enable it, it should be enabled. If I want to disable it for a special situation, I'll disable it. I shouldn't have a "Gotcha" moment hours into decent weighting painting, and then have to redo it because Mirror X was disabled for the objects I was working on, which is then exacerbated by there being no real function to copy existing bones' weight painting to the other side's mirrored bones.
This is a major noob trap.
Additionally, why does Topology Mirror even exist in weight painting? Who uses this? Why is the mouse-over description so vague and worthless for it?
Is anyone actually working on the weight painting section of Blender? Please help me not feel like a masochist attempting to understand why the mirroring section of weight painting is so weirdly vague for a program that does everything else pretty well.
I seriously don't get why this is so needlessly confusing, particularly with the constant UI toggle changes since 2.79. Rigging and weight painting can already be extremely frustrating and complex, and these weird settings with bad descriptions just makes it worse. And then, none of them are enabled by default, when I have to imagine, that at least more than half of people are going to enable these settings for X mirrored work, but then, they'll have to watch several videos to figure out why their weight painting isn't mirroring properly.
2 Comments
It's ok to be frustrated and understandable to vent it out sometimes, but blenderartists.org would be way better suited for that.
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So could you please edit your post so that it can reach its full potential? A "well thought-out, actionable proposal that a Blender developer can work with".
If you don't think this is a well thought-out, actionable proposal, feel free to report it and possibly get it removed. At least 4 other people think it's useful.