How to fix rigging issues between armor mesh and skeleton mod in Outfit Studio?

[Victoria34]

I’ve been trying to get a custom armor set I downloaded to work with my character’s specific skeleton mod, but the mesh just deforms weirdly in-game. I’m not sure if I need to adjust the weighting in Outfit Studio or if there’s a simpler fix I’m missing for this kind of rigging mismatch.

[David98]

Yeah I ran into this too when the armor came from a different kit. The mesh would pinch around elbows when I moved, and it was mostly because the bone names and hierarchy didn’t line up with the skeleton mod. I opened the mesh in Outfit Studio, compared the bone list to the mod, and did a light reweighting on the chest and shoulders until there was no obvious distortion in a quick pose test. It helped, but the elbows and knees still acted up sometimes.

[MatthewW]

Another time I swore it was scale. If the armor is even a hair off in scale from the skeleton, it will deform in weird ways no amount of weight painting fixes. I export with the same unit scale as the skeleton and reimport, that helped a bit.

[Violet.J]

I tried banging away at weights for hours and it felt like a losing game. Sometimes the vertex groups just don’t map cleanly to the bone rig, so you end up chasing little pinches that keep coming back.

[SamuelL]

I even half-checked if the issue was the pose used to bake the weights. In a neutral pose it behaved a little better, then in motion it got goofy again. Maybe the problem isn’t just the weights but how the skeleton mod animates that region.

[Richard.G]

Have you verified that the skeleton mod uses the same bone names and the same root as the armor expects?