I think the reason that weight gets shifted to other bones when you remove the influence of a different bone is because the weight painting is "normalized."  In other words, there must always be 100% worth of weight assigned to any particular vertex in the clothing mesh.  Otherwise, the cloth would slowly get "left behind" during animation.  As you remove weight, it must go somewhere, so it goes to other nearby bones.  It is the greatest weakness in armature-based animation, and makes long, flowing clothes quite difficult to animate.  If the project is a film-style one (as opposed to real time, video-game type), then a physics-based cloth simulation may be better.  Another option is to rig the flowing part of the clothing itself, and animate that alongside the human skeleton.  Definitely not a quick or easy task. 

Thanks a ton @4u2ges, this was super generous of you to spend the time to do this--super surprised. It's unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be a real answer of fixing the "whack-a-mole" weirdness in CC3 with painting weights as one might expect in a professional 3D editor, and that it requires something like Blender/Maya to put in the effort to fix. Also, terrible about the CC3 bug for exporting certain MD clothes to FBX--wow. I know you said you didn't want to be paid, but happy to pay you still :)  Thanks so much--super kind of you.

Hey Ben, I'll look at it tonight.

About crash. There is a *thing* between MD and CC. Multiple users reported this problem. Solution was to take cloth to Blender first, then export as OBJ and then bring it to CC.

Hi @jlittle, So I originally had them in MD and exported as a single mesh, then tried 2 separate meshes as well, and found I could better weight each piece of clothing separately without doing this whole "whack-a-mole" weighting weirdness in CC3.  But no matter what way, individual or separate, I still run into the same issue of CC3 doing weird weighting.  I am trying to learn Blender right now to see if that is any different.

@4u2ges thanks for the offer--just sent you a link via PM. I was able to mostly fix the mesh from the TPose when moved to APose as you mentioned; however, when I try to export the the model to FBX it crashes CC3 every single time--Obj works fine though for some reason (Support ticket opened).  I'm putting this in Unity so the cloth map isn't an option, I am trying to get as much of the animation done with regular bone animation, and then playing around with Alembic (Cloth) + Bone (Character) as a better option for true cloth simulation (exported from MarvelousD.). Like what this workload shows (https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/12/04/adam-the-evolution-of-alembic-support-in-unity/).

Jeff asked a good question.
As far as I can see the drape is a separate item of cloth and was simulated separately?

I like a T-pose. Bottom part is easy to fix with Mesh Edit.
Shoulder can be fixed a little but not much and it would look better than the one weighted in A-pose.

Now here's something to understand. It almost impossible to tweak the weights of baggy cloth to perfection (regardless A, or T pose)
With bone weights, the vertex can only have statically assigned bone influence. It can not change at animation run time.
This is where Physics comes in handy. Cloth items such as drapes or cloaks, as Mike suggested,
must have Physics map applied to simulate natural movement at some parts, where gravity should take precedence. Bone weight simply cannot compensate that.
Specifically his left shoulder (T-pose weighted) can only be fixed with Physics to look *good*. Applying Physics is also not a walk in the park and I am not even sure if it can be transferred to Unity (I know almost nothing about it).

Anyhow, I do not have a Discord account. If you wish, just pack both versions - a T-pose sim and an A-pose sim from CC and use Dropbox or Google Drive or similar. I try to have a look at it and advise you.

Just a thought but,
are the robe and drape two separate clothing items?
If so are they on different layers?

Jeff



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Exactly @facr73! :)  When I remove the weights it just changes the weights on a different part of the arm, then I remove those as well, and come back to the original part of the arm I removed the weights and now they are back with some other weird weights.

Hi @Kelleytoons, I made this in Marvelous Designer 9.5.  I also made the Robe underneath in MD, and it has the same problems, no matter what built-in weighting applied it gives terrible weights around the arms.  This is with Default, Cloak, Dress, etc.. Is there any reason why CC3 has a "Whack-A-Mole" game where if you change the weighting it keeps spreading it out along a bunch of other bones?  Even if I completely delete all the weights from bones they just keep getting spread around--makes no sense to me.  I guess I'll just bring it into Blender and learn how to do weighting there.  The reason why I didn't bring in the clothes in TPose was because the model I am animating in Unity is going to be in a pose with his hands near his sides and the simulation of the robe was exactly how I wanted it like in MD. If I were to simulate the clothes in MD in T-pose they would droop down and not have the desired look I wanted.

Hi @4u2ges, thanks for the offer to help--I was hoping this would just be a "oh you are doing it wrong, use this brush!" type of thing. Yes, this is in MD, and I needed it formed not in the T-Pose for the designed wrinkles/draping for my character. The character is going to just be talking with their hands outstretched so wanted to get the right look without having to do Alembic (which looks like the best results if I put the time into to sync the character anims to it in Unity).Happy to let you look at it if you think you can spot something easily I am missing :)  My Discord User is: BenHumphrey#7297, I can send you the CC3 file--thanks!
Here is what I want it to look like (which is how I modeled it in MD:
https://gyazo.com/54394beb51a49c1ebd3cf25dcd8d1382

If I put it in TPose and then apply the Dress weighting (which is the closest best result I've found for this) it looks like this when I put it back to the main pose the character will be in (notice the scrunched shoulder of the tunic and gap on the bottom left):
https://gyazo.com/5d08e3cde4948d89810f8f5387b31feb

Sorry, don't want to hijack thread, but total knee replacement last Tuesday.  Recover is... challenging.  I can sit for around 30 minutes (and my laptop is no longer capable.  Of almost anything.  I've ordered a new one but it won't be here for several weeks, at which point I might not need it <g>  At least for now).

This, too, shall pass.  But I appreciate those of you who care.

---

Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Hoi Kelleytoons, how are you, recovering fast? Just wondering ...