when can we change bones without re-skinning?

[stormtroopar]

Oh man, I thought I was the only one. I have been asking for them to change the skinning tool paradigm for a long time now and they have done nothing ever since the tools are created. Painting should only occur for finite, small detail tweaks, not as a major workflow. Its slow, speed and workflow. The smoothbind system is such a dumb system. I will take envelope type system any day. Not only does it have a better approach, but it makes transferring skinning from different characters (even very different resolution) much easier. Bones Pro for Max is something that kicks its butt and that was 6 years ago. If maya had a skinning system like that, it would literally save me half the time. After all these versions with no changes, I am starting to seriously doubt the capability of Alias engineers in this area. I mean afterall, they have never came up with any kind of good skinning system since poweranimator til now. Influence object is cool, but they are slow as hell and memory intensive as well, and AGAIN, they take a long time to setup which goes back to the workflow issue again. I rather they have a good underlying base skin core first then all these other features on top. Something fast, has a good fast workflow, and good deformation quality. Spiky vertices for example should not be something that occurs naturally in the skinning process, not unless the user tries very hard to make it happen.

On the issue of reposition joints without reskin, try this plugin called resetSkinJoint. It basically allows you to do that without having to reskin. You do have to tweak the weight on the changed joint but thats it. Very useful. Also, Michael Comet wrote a few other tools thats very handy in there. The posedeformer is awesome! It " lets you create sculpted corrective shapes similar to a blendshape, but with a true pose space deformer. It properly stores shapes in joint space and reapplies them after the skinCluster" Also, I find a few of his scripts VERY useful as well. Worth checking out if you do character setup.

http://www.comet-cartoons.com/toons/melscript.cfm

[Firas]

thankx for those plugins links .. i cant try them now because am in the middle of the project... and already i behind the time... but am sure i'll use them in my next project..

messiah has the great mode, when u want to fix joints position and number, then go back to animation mode..

i agree if alais focus on rigging flow, then they will make from Maya the a kick ass tool.

about the envilop thing .. there was a plugin on highend but its for maya 5 i think.. i remember that i try it, and it wasnt bad .. but u know, those ideas should be developed inside maya.

thankx again.

Firas.

[stormtroopar]

Another thing you can try with just maya tools is if your mesh has 'really' clean UVs, no overlapping, then you can save your weight maps out, detach your skin, adjust your joint, reskin with the same joints, and just import the weight maps and you should have the same weights and just to readjust the new joints.

If that doesn't work, you can try the copy weights tool. It works pretty accurately on the same mesh with the same influences.

I try that envelope plugin. The type of color display was what I was looking for, but it had some opengl issue and the tool wasn't something that can be used in real situations reliabily and easily.

YES! they should be built inside maya. I really don't know how they design their tools sometimes. But the funny thing is, nobody seems to be bothered by it... lots of people think its good. Maybe they have just never tried a different approach so they don't know there are other better and faster ways of doing skinning. I think if more people voice out, it will be more likely that Alias will do something about it.

[Keetell]

Thank You So Much For Posting This!

[ThomasMahler]

One thing bout skin weights: It'll never give you perfect results. Never. Period.

But try this one: If your model already has proper UV's, copy it, save it out. Do an automatic UV mapping on the original model, THEN save the weights out. You won't have any overlapped UVs or whatever that way. Now do all your adjustments and stuff and import your weight maps again. Then, use UV Transfer from the copied model (the one with proper UVs) to transfer the good UVs back to the original model.

Should work that way.

Also, Michael Comet wrote this great, little script... I guess it name was saveSkinWeights.mel - It wrote out the weights for every vertex of your mesh - And did a perfect job. No weight maps, instead you got data, a text file. Then you've been able to adjust bones, add some, delete some, and import the weights again - easy as pie and very reliable. Bad thing is: The last time I tried it (Maya 6.0), it didn't work anymore. It used to work with 5.0 though...

And I'm totally with Stormtrooper. Alias is sleeping for quite a while now... guess it'll never be the same again.

[Raul3d]

Thomas, thanks for the info, and thanks ,of course, to Mr. Comet for these great scripts. They've saved my life... wooho.

[kevinstiles]

Yeah alias really needs to get its head on straight. It seems like when ever they come out with a new version instead of fixing the problems they simply have added a bunch of new features, none of which work properly. This problem is even more frustrating because Maya is the industry standard.

[rebo]

Use this:

aeSkinWeightsTransfer v1.0:

Export and import smooth skin weights by comparing the World Space positions of the selection's Control Points with the World Space positions of the Exported Control Points. If it doesn't find an Export Point very close to the Import point, it will average the weights of the Export Points in the vicinity of the Import Point.

Features: UV-independent; Topology-independent; Type-independent (transfer weights between Nurbs, Polys, SubD:s Lattices etc); Transfer weights between any number of Shapes/Skin Clusters; Remove "new" Influence Transforms (joints etc.) from all Skin Clusters in selection; Limit the number of Non-Zero weights for selected Points without modifying the Skin Cluster(s).

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/mel/?group=melscripts&section=animation

Its really easy, export your weights unattach, tweak bones, and re import weights.

[Pickman]

Hey guys, interesting thread, I have two questions:

First is about the resetskinJoint, I installed it because I had issues with some of my joints position: what is exactly the workflow ?
I turned the skincluster off tweak the pivot of my joint, entered resetSkinJoint in the commandline and turned the enveloppe back to 1. But I have translate on X,Y,Z now for my joint...is that the correct workflow ?

Second question is about the number of joints:
I realized I had to add one more joint for the rolling shoulders and three extra joints for the facial rigging. I'm very happy with my skinweights, what is the shortest way to restore the skinning weights on the skeleton ? (without adding influences) I was told to just disconnect the skinCluster's matrix from the joints then connect it to its inverseMatrix, do the edits, add my joints and then reconnect. But I can't perform the connection in the editor, I must be something wrong there...

I haven't done enough rigging to get it right straight from scratch.
THX

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.