I have a problem with a mesh that moves unexpectedly with a bone, so I thought that I might want to normalize all the bone weights to get a "true" picture of the weights. Normalizing however, moves the mesh around which I didn't expect. (some of the bones are posed when I do normalize).
My impression was that the overall bone-influence result would be the same after normalizing, but since the mesh moves around, it seems this isn't so. Am I doing something wrong, or did I just mis-understand the normalize-all operation? (I tried both with and without any bones selected).
(also, noob-alert)
EDIT: Ok, I may have totally misunderstood something. But I tried making a simple skeleton and object: Two bones controlling a cube'ish thing. Painted all vertices red for both bones (weight 1.0 for both bones), and then picked normalize all. Now one bone had weight 1.0 on a vertex, the other bone got 0.0. I understand that blender has now made sure total weight <=1, but I would have expected the weight to have been shared, something like 0.5 for each bone on that vertex.