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.

Painting the Fear and Loathing Fish

slowly going insane...

Spent the last 3 hours painting seamsless textures and bone weights (this ones an FK only rig... I'm running out of time).  At least the fish can now deform into shapes like this, and blow bubbles thanks to instanced metaballs on a particle system emitting from his cigarette!  He has a nice irradescent glow which changes colour as he turns round courtesy of blender's underused 'magic' texture mapped to the reflection channel.  Animation starts tomorrow!