Today's Top Tip: Workaround for buggy auto-weighting in Blender

If you're using auto-weighting in blender and you come across a complex mesh where it just isn't working - you probably have flipped normals.  Just tab into edit mode and W>flip.  If that doesn't work  my workaround was to build a much lower resolution mesh with nice clean topology for auto-weighting, then use this script which I quickly cobbled together to proximity copy weights.  It will copy all the weights from the source object to the target object, but be warned it will overwrite any existing vertex groups on the target, which you might be using for other non-binding related tasks.

Smooth Vertex Group Weights in Python

I had to do some weight painting this morning in blender (for masking displacement textures and wave modifiers, not skinning bones for once!) and was faced with the usual problem of having to smooth out vertex group weights.  It struck me that I was painting all the way along one of my edge loops, and instead of laboriously going up and down the edge loop with the blur brush trying ever so hard not to paint bits of mesh in the background, I could select those edge loops quickly and easily in edit mode and write an operator to smooth out the weights of the active vertex group.

Before and After

I've bundled this into the tube project's 'Edge Tools' which I wrote back in the summer.  The latest release is available here: http://www.pasteall.org/17726/python just copy and paste into a text file and run from the script editor or save it as a .py and install from the add-ons menu.  Its in the Ctrl-V menu or Spacebar>Smooth Vertex...