Skinning Question

[Dazza]

Sorry, pressed enter.

My question is Maya can skin just a whole mesh?,with one skin cluster,alex splits up mesh into 7 pieces,useing wraps,giving himself 7 clusters. Is the splitting up the single meash because,if it was 1 mesh and u start painting weights,you are just spreading the weight around,so i will always have funky results,and my componant editer will always show all bones giveing small weight s (006).
dazza

[svenip]

i don't understand your question right now.

you wanna have a single piece geometry character !? ok why not use subd's !!!

you wanna skin with one single skin cluster ??? not possible. every joint has it's own skin cluster. that's what skinning in maya is like.

or am i totally wrong and don't understand your question ??

[Dazza]

Sorry to mislead,this was a skinning question.I have made my character from the cps tool mel,then made my skeleton,bound it with smooth bind(max influences at 3)then worked from the body out to in.I got to the spine joints,
then tested the joints finding problems,such as the legs moveing but then the rib area caves in.I checked all the other bones,and they caused the same probs.then opened up the componant editor,and saw that all the cvs picked had influence over all the joints,i also tried pruneing with no effect.
I repeatedly tried to correct the results but this seemed to shift the weights around the bones in the body,my conclusion was that the body must be cut up to avoid the joints affecting cvs from one part of the body,(elbow) to another(knee).
That brought me to looking at the maya books for skinning a naked character,and the skinning vids from gnomon which uses wraps.

thanks for the reply

[k2skier]

when you skin with a smooth bind all of the joints have control of all of the cvs, you can't edit the membership like a rigid bind. The way to change the influence would be to paint the weights (add or remove) from the areas that are causing strange movement in other areas.

hope that helps!

[beaker]

With smooth bind weights you picked a max influence of 3. So that means that a max of 3 bones can have influence on any one point. Well the total weight is equal to 100%. 3 bones have to share that 100%, so if you have 30% on one bone and you paint it off, it has to go somewhere, it doesnt just dissapear. So maya picks another joint to move that 30% to. Thats why I tend to only add and not remove weight, since removing is going to move the weight to some other random joint that Im just going to have to paint again.

[svenip]

try to work that way.

i usually turn off weight normalization (it's in the skin/skeleton menu). this turns off the computation that all the bones together are always 100%. but be carefull and make sure by your own in the component editor that it's all together one at each cv (the last column in the editor will tell you).

that keeps you from this "pain in the ass" thing, and you can edit your own way.

hope this helps.

[Dazza]

Thanks for your input,i I have sort of worked out to get most of the cave in sorted out,some stilll wants to move in the rib area when i move the fingers,and knees,but it is getting better.
I feel i have made a to dense a model,with to much detail,and my 1st model should have been lower polys,just so when editing smooth bind things move faster and see things clearer.
does the prune weights work all the time? as i try it at 0.0010 every thing should dissapear,but it works some times not always.
Lastly, dont suppose there is a mel out there that allows you to pick a bone and it shows the verts that is affecting it(WHEN BOUND),so if my knee is moved , then picking the knee bone would show all verts lit up around the elbow area(if afected by it)
Sorry , a month on this prob has driven me insane!!!!!!!!!!!!

[magilla]

I'm guessing the theory is the same for poly chars as it is for nurbs, but I think the original intention of binding separate pieces of mesh is that when you need to make a change to your bones - you don't have to jump through hoops to re-weight the whole character.

I don't know of a way to save my weighting if I want to add polys or merge extra mesh and re-bind. Exporting is very dodgy and doesn't give good results.

Any suggestions?

--magilla

[Dazza]

In the gnomon skinning tapes 1 and 2,i feel it is suggested that if u have a hi rez and low rez whole single meshes and you split the low rez carefully into seven pieces,so all the verts match up with the hi rez still,then you
create a wrap for these pieces with the hi rez.This gives you the chance to skin
individual pieces to bones,ie hand geom to hand bones,this is said to stop funky weighting on bones affecting bones,but also speeds up the process copying weights from one side to the other.But if you want to add more detail to a mesh,i m sure you must start from scratch again,as i have to do it,also the above workflow only works on lower rez meshes as i have learnt to my cost,this is to do with the wrapping not likeing to higher poly count..

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