Hiding vertices from Automatic Weights process? I am trying to bind a Rigify Pitchipoy rig to my human mesh. I want to use Automatic Weights to bind, but keep getting the "Bone Heat Weighting: failed to find solution for one or more bones" error. I have already researched this and have also found the precise area of my mesh that is causing the problem.

It is a very dense area with many veritices. If I delete this area from the mesh, the Automatic Weight works perfectly.

My question is, can I somehow omit/hide/mask this particular area of vertices from the automatic weight process? I want it to believe this area don't exist when it runs, as if I had deleted it. And then I can manually paint that area afterwards.

I am using the latest version of Blender. Would appreciate any help a lot! :)
UPDATE: I have found a workaround that seems to solve the problem. I don't know if there is a smarter way, but I'll post it for anyone else with a similar issue.


I selected all the vertices that made up the problematic area, pressed P and separated by "Selection".
I then select my mesh (which is now separated from the problematic vertices), go to Weight Paint mode and then do Automatic Weights binding.
After weighting process is complete, I select the seperated mesh, then shift-select my main mesh and do Ctrl+J to join them again.
Then I go back to weight paint mode and click the bone nearest to this area and manually paint it so it follows the rig.
Finally, I manually merge (Alt+M) EACH INDIVIDUAL vertex at the points where they were cut/separated.


This solved the problem, and it even kept the shape keys I had in that area from being destroyed, since no vertices was added or removed by doing this. If anyone have a smarter method, I would still love to hear it!