Weighting separated objects as one I have a set of armors that are made of separated pieces like belts. All the pieces are joined as one object, but topologically they are separated (because they were made in Zbrush with mask+extract technique). When i parent an armor to armature with automatic weights, here is what happens:

http://gifyu.com/images/weightSeparateObj.gif (Update: gif needs to load there, it may take some time)

http://www74.zippyshare.com/v/ocwFam30/file.html
(Fixed: I don't know why the gif can't upload here, but it works after downloading)

As you can see, belts are moving different and each part has different weighting which causes intersecting and other bad looking things. I've tried manually painting/fixing weights, but it is almost impossible to do it correctly on separate objects like these. How to handle this problem?
This problem is nicely solvable with voxel binding that unfortunately blender doesn't have yet.

The problem would be less visible if the polygons would be segmented the same on the torso and the belts, increasing the polycount will help against the artifacts.

A blender solution is to join everything into 1 piece mesh:


with boolean union and clean up the mesh after it
with knife tool to cut slots for the belts in torso and to cut out excess belts inside the torso. Then joining it together.