Make Weight-Painting More Like Mesh Editing

When adding an armature to a model, one of the steps is to weight paint the mesh to improve deformation. This is generally a process of choosing a brush strength and watching the vertices fly around as you try to paint them. It is difficult and nonintuitive, especially for beginners.

But what if weight painting were more like modifying a mesh in Edit Mode? The user would select vertices, perhaps even using Proportional Editing, and drag them where they want them. Behind the scenes, blender would be adjusting the weights of affected vertices, but all the user would need to care about would be dragging vertices around.

Now, the apparent problem with this is that you can't use weight painting to migrate vertices anywhere you like -- the weight painting process will only move a vertex forward or backward along a single path.

But who cares? It's really very similar to using "gg" in edit mode to drag a vertex along an existing edge. All we want to do is drag vertices along a path defined by the different weights a vertex could have, instead of dragging it along an edge of the mesh.

Because of this similarity to the "gg" UI, blender already has the intuitive interface to do the same thing with weight painting. Just as with "gg", blender could include the identical extra visual elements to inform the user of the path available to drag the vertex along.

And just as users can currently use "gg" to slide multiple vertices along edges at the same time, so they could slide multiple vertices back and forth along their weight-trajectories. Even enabling proportional editing could simply allow all vertices within range to slide along their respective weight-trajectories, with falloff specified by the proportional editing UI. So the blender interface for weight painting could truly be made to be much more similar to the interface for mesh editing.

This seems like a way to make weight painting much simpler for the user, by giving it an interface that is very similar to the mesh editing interface they are already familiar with.