Thanks @jgonzalez . Looking forward to it.
I did a “brute force” technique which seemed to work well. Long and tedious, but straightforward and easy to understand.
A. Massively clean up armature
1. Keep “master”, “root”, all “DEF-*” bones. Delete all other bones.
2. Delete a few extra floating “DEF-*” bones not part of skeleton.
3. For all DEF-* bones, check and fix parenting to get the skeleton tree.
4. For all DEF-* bones, check and fix “Connected”. Some of them look connected but aren’t.
5. Merge to remove a few unwanted divisions in spine, leg, arm bone chains.
B. Re-skin
For each skin mesh,
1. Delete all vertex groups.
2. Re-parent mesh to clean armature, automatic weights.
3. In Weight Paint, delete all the unnecessary vertex groups.
NOTE: For fingers, keep the hand and last 3 finger bones only.
4. In Weight Paint, select each valid vertex group and verify/update the weights.
Export FBX Armature/Mesh and import into Unity. Seems clean without lots of extra noise.
Select Humanoid rig and automatically create avatar.
[If you survive, give yourself a treat.]
I hope to save the “clean” armature in a safe place to use again on other characters.
