I’ve created a folding paper animation in my 3D app. The paper folds crosswise and then lengthwise. The only good way I can think of to do this is to have bones that control each dimension at 100% vertex weight, so the total of each vertex ends up being 200%.
When I import this animation into Unity, it no longer works because Unity normalizes all the bone weights to 1. Am I SOL?
You may need to look at Point Cache to do that.
Or - instead setup the bones in an ‘H’ control pattern.
Set up the bones so the root is located at the center of the page where it doesn’t fold. Add 1 or 2 (your choice) bones per folded segment out from this root. These bones will control the folding of the paper vertically. 1-2 bones per each folded segment also for horizontal folds - parented to the previous bones that are the vertical fold bones.
Vertex weighting will only be 100%.
So the top left most vertex will only be weighted 100% to the bone that creates the last fold. And since this bone is parented to a bone that folds the other way (horizontal/vertical) it will be influenced by the parent bone, but only be weighted to the closest child bone.
Does this make any sense?
Quick sketch for reference -
I’ve used this simple setup several times for folding paper and it works very well.
This helps a lot. Thanks for taking the time to make a diagram and everything. After some fiddling, I was able to get a page that folds into thirds in both dimensions (so that it can fold over itself on several creases). Most of the paper’s nine segments have two bones at 50% weight (one crosswise and one lengthwise), which means there had to be thin “creases” in the geometry at the intersections. The only exception are the cardinal directions, which only need to fold in one direction (N, S, E, W). A number of bones need to be rotated simultaneously to get an exact vertical or horizontal fold, but it works well with a little brain twisting. Here are some images.
Thanks for your help!
You got it!
Yeah I’ve done the 9 segment folding setup also a couple times and it just takes a little more finesse for the vertex weighting, but I was hoping you’d get the gist.
Funny how such simple things - we know in our minds - are so hard to explain sometimes! 
