I have followed the Blender workflow for creating CC Clothing using Blender and I have made numerous counts of successful content. However, there are things that I have tried outside of the regular workflow which have led to some oddities that I was not able to explain. If someone can explain some or all of these, it would be much appreciated.

1. When weight painting meshes prior to import into CC, the workflow is to add the clothing mesh to the armature, transfer weight from the CC Body to the clothing mesh, correct weight maps if needed and export. When attaching the mesh to the armature the correct select is to Create Empty Weight Groups. I tried the Automatic Weight Groups option, thinking it might be a good starting point for some content, but using that option the resulting FBX file fails to load. No real explanation of why, just fails to load. Why is this? I would have thought that the Automatic Weight Groups should create the same Empty Weight Groups and then automatically weight paint them using some algorithm. I used this option for some props and it worked great...but not for CC clothing. Why?

2. When a weight map is set to 0 (blue in Blender), as I understand it, it means it has not contributions from the corresponding bone. Thus, as an extreme case, if all of the bones had empty weight maps the corresponding mesh should become a static mesh with no contributions form any bone movement. However, I have made content for which initially bones had non-clear weight maps (after the transfer weight maps process) but I intentionally clear these weight maps to remove the contributions from some bones. For example, I created a dress where the bottom of the dress (waist and down) was made empty. Yes, I realize that is not correct for a dress but I wanted to see if it truly would not be affected by the leg bones...however, when the character walked the left side and right side still moved and sheared according to the leg bones. If the results had been completed from weight maps only then there would not be a shearing between the legs because the softcloth would try to stretch the cloth but what I was seeing was shearing as if the dress was still responding to leg bone movements.

3. In some cases, typically when I cleared a lot of weight maps (but still kept some), I get errors loading the file into CC. Either it does not load at all or it starts to complain about no matching bone/mesh. In these cases, I used the exact same workflow so the mesh bones were present as in all other cases. Is there some weight map minimum requirements which need to be met in order for the weight maps to work?

4. One in a while, when I import some CC cloth, push it to iClone, add some weight maps and the animate, I get a piece of the CC cloth that gets stuck to a point in space. I don't mean relative to the character, I mean relative to the world. Like if the CC Cloth clothing got hooked on a static nail and then the character tried to walk away (thus the nail stretches the fabric). As far as I know both mesh weight paint and physics weight maps are relative to the armature or parent (i.e. the character's armature or the character). Without either a constraint (which does not work with softcloth) or a morph, it should not be able to pull a fabric this way.


"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast