I am trying to rig a vroid asset I exported from vroid studio:
So far so good. Now, this issue is that the exported vroid mesh object is actually comprised of separate sets of connected vertices. That is, the arm portion of the mesh has vertices that are all locally connected to themselves, but not to any vertices on, say, the torso. There are basically seams of overlapping or near overlapping vertices where the shoulder, leg/hip region, neck/skull area, et al.
This causes problems with deforming the mesh:
I think the problem is that the vertices on both sides of the mesh where the seams are at need to have exactly the same weight painting. And as you can see by the next photo, they currently do not:
My first instinct was to go into weight paint mode and just go over the area of the seam and set to 100% weight with a 50px brush. Unfortunately, this still produced smaller breaks in the mesh that didn't look good, and also ruined the deformation of mesh overall. I then tried to figure out a way to explicitly set the vertexes along the seams to have the same weight... but doing this using a painting brush seems... much harder than I feel like it should be.
For reasons that I won't go into right now, I don't want to merge the separate meshes into one mesh. I feel like this is also probably a coommon situation, but for the life of me I can't figure out the specific terminology to describe this situation well enough for duckduckgo to be of much use. (I have also searched on the other leading engines.)
Could somebody explain the proper way to handle this situation? Thanks in advance for your time.