OK I have this head mesh working in game it is set up as a "helmet". When getting it in game I merged the verts with click Alt+M and selected 'Merge At Last' in blender to the robert female upper body, in nifscope I do not see any gaps. Basically I welded the head to the upper body to eliminate mesh seams, then I deleted the upper body part again, so that only the head remains. I then used Blenders bone weight copy on another head helmet that works in game but it is for the roberts male body.

So can blender copy "skin" weights or is this a 3dMax thing? I know blender has a "Bone" weight copy. In game there is always a neck gap very slight but gets even larger when the character goes into sneak mode :/ Is this a weight-painting issue? How would one go about making sure that neck vertices share the same bones and weights as the neck vertices of the upper body?

Pictures of the seam on the right side of the neck:

http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/2930/oblivion201010122203388.jpg

http://img830.imageshack.us/img830/721/oblivion201010101614182.jpg


I then tried the vanilla head mesh using blenders bone weight copy #3 and the neckline was perfect but the mouth crumpled like a tin can. Then I tried the weights from the vanilla upper body and that didn't work either, some attempts looked pretty good but when the character went into sneak mode their were huge distorted/weight problems.

Anybody have any advice on how to deal with this? I don't have any hand painting weighting experience so is this super hard?

I don't know if it helps much, but here's some things I experienced when trying similar things.

You can use the Bone Weight Copy scripts. Using a Merge Vertex approach though never preserves the weights of any vertex. The result will always be a mix although you explicitly intended to keep the source/target ones. I learned this the hard way when I got perfectly aligning custom body parts but horrible gaps between these and existing body meshes.
So when I intend to finish weighting of a new lowerbody mesh for example, I import a fresh original one, remove any vertices below the waist line (the only weights I need), select the borderline vertices of my lowerbody, leave Edit Mode, co-select the prepared waist line mesh to copy from, and then when issuing the bone weight copy choose the "Update Selected" option (or what it's called). This way my otherwise perfectly-weighted new lowerbody just gets the connection line weights reset to normal and I usually end up with a perfectly aligning lowerbody mesh without any gaps.

With head meshes it might be a little more tricky with Bone Weight Copy, as they have an abundance of unconnected polygones flying about which don't meet the eye on first sight, but still I'm sure something similar could be done to just get the neck line aligning perfectly in the end.

I'd use the alternative which leads to the most acceptable overall results for your head helmet and then try to fix only the weights of the neck line in a way similar to what I described.
Hope it helps some.

Hi Drake Thanks for your reply.

I think I was pretty much following you except for the part about how the rest of the head would get weighted? Weight paint by hand?

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/6478/necki.jpg

lol
http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/415/crumpled.jpg

I must get this right someday :/

How was the head mesh in your first image link in the OP done? Wasn't it alright apart from only the neck line already?
Copying bone weights from the Vanilla head mesh for a shape that different won't work, because the influence of the weights to copy subsides with the distance, and some vertices of the head helmet are just too far away from the vertices of the head mesh to receive any bone weights at all. I have no idea how to properly rig such a complex helmet, but in your first image it was looking quite fine already apart from the neck line. I'd just use this approach and then try to fix the neck line weights with "Update Selected" as I described above.

Yeah the head was good except for neck weighting. I was under the impression that you needed to remove the rigging before bone weight copying like how you would have to with regular bone weight copying. But with this "update selected" that you have described you just leave the weights intact so that is what happened in the above picture when I deleted them. So now that I fully understand you and did exactly what you described it worked like a charm The neckline is perfect now.

Drake I can't thank you enough :foodndrink: