The Wrong Solution, and Pure Awesomeness

Today I started classes. This semester is mainly General Education, but I do have one Digital Media class. And that was the first class I took today. And. It. Was. Awesome. The entire class was Pure Awesomeness.

In Axis Mundi news, I have about half of the vertex groups in my armature on a "White List." This means that they will not cause a failure in the importer. Then there are 2 vertex groups that I have on a "Black List." This means that if they are imported they will most certainly cause a failure in the importer. I have not classified the remaining bones. The good news - in fact very good news - is that when I clear the weight painting on a Black Listed vertex group, and then re-weight it, it imports correctly. This means that I've pretty much figured out how to fix everything and make it import properly.

I thought I had also figured out something even more elusive about this whole importing fiasco; the cause of the issue. Sometimes the cause of a computer issue is significantly more difficult to determine than the solution. In this case, I thought I had found the solution AND the cause of the problem, however during the course of writing this blog post I tried to verify my hypothesis and I got results that I did not expect. However, I think it is still worth including what I was thinking up until just a few minutes ago. The text in italics is what I wrote when I thought I knew what caused the problem. It still contains true statements that are relevant to Blender and describes what did in fact happen, it's just that the conclusion of the sequence of events is not actually what caused the importing error.

I'm pretty sure that the cause of the importer's problems with the vertex groups can be described by the conclusion of this sequence of events: At one point during my weight painting I accidentally painted without having X-mirror enabled. (This wasn't my fault, by the way, in Blender 2.48a the X-mirror option does not stay turned on between sessions. That's one of the very rare times I've thought something in the Blender interface is completely nonsensical.) I then proceeded to weight paint one side of the mesh for a while, without realizing that the painting was not automatically being done to the other side. Once I had completed a not inconsiderable amount of work, I realized the mistake that had been made. Of course I didn't want to have to do the same work over again for the other side of the mesh, so... (and here's the punchline).... I used a script that copied the weight from one side of the mesh to the other. More specifically, the script "Mirror Vertex Locations & Weight." I've never used it before, and while it was helpful, that's probably what caused the error in the importer.

So anyways, all this post really amounts to is me talking about a whole bunch of technical Blender stuff because going to my Digital Media class has gotten me more excited than usual about all things 3D, Blender, and Computer-y.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH DigitalMediaexcitedblendidhfilmovifajsdfhaklehf.

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I probably need to calm down before I develop an aneurysm.