Unwrap on skinned character

[_vine_]

You're gonna need to reskin because you don't want to have all of that history weighing down your character. Also, you don't need to import or export weights to do it.

Make a copy of your character and layout the UVs on it however you want them to be layed out.

Then apply the smooth binding to the UV'ed character to the same skeleton as the original skinned character. Select the original character, shift select the UV'ed character and then apply Skin->Edit Smooth Skin->Copy Skin Weights.

As long as the vertices align fairly well on the original and UV'ed model this will copy your skin weights correctly. Just make sure you have the exact same number of influence objects (joints, etc.) between the original and UV'ed characters before copying the skin weights. If you have an extra joint or are missing one this will cause problems. Copy Skin Weights is nice because it relies solely on vertex position and not vertex numbering. Importing and Exporting skin weights in Maya relies upon UV coordinates which is why is hasn't worked for you (it uses image maps to save the skin weights). Most other plugins available work off of vertex numbers, which will be changed by mirroring half your character.

I use this technique quite often at my job and it works very accurately and quickly.

I hope this helps.

[Sagroth]

Great thanks!

I just totaly forgot about Copy Skin Weights tool ;)

I'd duplicated skinned geometry with 'Duplicate Input Graph' checked and everything succeeded.

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