Painting Skin Weights (Frustrating)

[forflowers]

it means your trying to paint weights on locked wieghts. Just hit the unhold button on the joint that is influencing those verts. if you dont know which joint it is just unhold all the joints then paint your weight and re hold the joints agian.
painting weight is frustrating but you'll get the hang of it.
one technique in painting weights is to flood all the weights to the root joint and hold all the other joints.

[revilo3D]

I think it is esstential to use a script for weight painting.. skinny or skinning tools are a complete must! They will help you achieve results with the previous mentioned technique quicker than mayas native weights interface

[_vine_]

First, nino18 is probably correct that you've turned on the joints' hold weights option. You will see it listed in the Paint Skin Weights window with "(Hold)" next to the joint's name. You are trying to take weights away from another joint whose weights are held meaning you can't add weights to your neck joint. You probably had the weights move to the foot joint because you replaced weights in the neck vertices without being careful about holding weights on all joints but where you wanted the weights to go to.

Second, what version of Maya are you using? I suggest using version 6, 6.01 or 8. Maya 6.5's weight normalization is broken and not worth the effort. This means that weights painted in one area may not paint the way they were intended. As well, the paint weights window will not "replace" or "add" weights correctly (especially if replacing or adding with a value of "1.0" or "0.0"). Also, the hold weights options is often overrided when replacing, adding or smoothing weights in Maya 6.5.

If you would care for it, I've been using Maya to bind characters as a character rigger and modeler for years and can post my workflow. If you follow it carefully it will prevent this ever happening to you again.

[Stopato]

A good thing when painting weights in Maya is to ADD influence (1) instead of (0) because when you add influence the other joints on that particular vertex will loose the respective ammount of influence. For instance: if you give a joint a 1 inf. to a vertex it will be 0 to all the other joints.
Another good thing is to paint on your lowpoly so you can work with more precision on each vertex, after that you can make a smooth an everything will be fine.
hope I could help! good luck

[FibreOptix]

Thanks for the replys,

All of my joints do not have the (HOLD) beside them.
I am using Maya 7.

[mustique]

Weight painting in Maya is almost the same f**ed up sh*t since since v1. :sad:

It requires you to hold weights on all but neighboring 2 joints (up and down the hiearchy) -
always try to "add" to weight values while painting - struggling through the component editor etc... There are good MEL scripts out there, but even the TD's themselves are sometimes not sure why things get screwed up in the process.

I can't understand why this very important area in rigging is so daunting in the 21st century for maya users. I'm not expecting Maya to deliver realtime muscle deformations like in Houdini 8.1. All I want to see is some solid weight painting/editing without getting frustated. :shrug:

[ftaswin]

Let's see if this one helps,

First, make SURE all joints place on the correct deformating spots, use 1 degree curves to lay out joints placement and create joints with point or curve snapping along those curves. Do not overcreate joints. the less u need the better = less headache.

Second, check your model. Make sure you have enough points to deform a section and you have nice loop to deform a section too.


Third, before you hit smooth bind, check the setting first.

Bind to joint hirarchy/selected joints.
It's easier to bind to joints hirarchy coz u only need to select the root joint, but a lot of time it's better to manually select the joints u need to deform to bind with the geometry(ies). So you might not want to select the tip joints if they have no purpose of influencing and vertex. Only bound joints will be displayed on your weight painting window.


Bind Method.
I usually leave it on default as I did not (never in personal experience) find a major difference that will effect weight painting later.

Max influence.
It's 5 by default. It's good IF you have so many joints on your character, but a lot of time for small/personal production i tend to use 3, sometime 4 max influence.

Maintain Max influence.
I normally check it off but I have seen others check it. It tells maya not to let too many joints/influence effect a single vertex and maintain the max number of influence of a vertex.

Drop off rate
4 by default. I normally set it on 6-ish number. It tells Maya how smooth you want to translate vertex weighting from one joint to another. 10 is very sharp and 0.1 is very very smooth. This is only initial value. You will change it by you weight painting.

==================================

Hit Bind.

After you bind your character, there are always problem because Maya automatically detects vertex influenced by joints base on your setting. Now it's time to paint weight. Some people like to set ALL weight to 1 on root and add weight accordingly to others manually. Lots of work, more control. Some like to work from root to fingers, others the other way around. Up to you.

Hehehee, following is probably the actual answer to your question. Gee,way too much coffee this morning...

Do not use replace=0 when painting weight. Never. Ever. A total weight on A vertex HAS TO BE equal to 1. When you do this, you took the influence of a joint on a vertex (an area) away completely (0). But since the total weight still has to be equal to one, the weight taken out AUTOMATICALLY assigned to other joints, most of the time the one you do not want the vertex to be influenced by. Use add instead. Smooth is good, but do not over use them. Use them a lot, but do not take it for granted.

Lock weight only if you are certain you do not want anymore weight in or out of a particular joint. This button can cause you headache too.

What else? Don't be afraid to go back to step one or two over and over again. A lot of time when you are stuck the best way is to start fresh. It took time to get use to it and more time to do it well.

That's all. More question Anyone? One from me. Have you tried red bull after two double Espressos?

Ft

[isoparmB]

That's a cocktail for a heart attack there mate. :] Nice tips on skin weighting.

Maya's skin weighting tools aren't all that bad, they just have a certain workflow which you have to get comfortable with. As an alternative to the paint weights tool, another option would be to use the component editor. At least you'll be able to get the exact numerical values of your skin influences per joint and see if you've gone above or below the normalized skin weight value on a vertice.

[amannin]

wish i had these kind of detailed explanations to learn from when i first painted weights.

just TURN OFF " Maintain Max influence" -- and you'll never run into that problem.

Flood each joint to 0, before painting influence on it, and you'll never run into problems.

its that simple.

(if you run into problems following this method, please disregard "never" and replace it with "shouldn't") --- jk :D

[ftaswin]

Flood each joint to 0,....

:D
:D
:D


Those weight still has to be transfered somewhere AUTOMATICALLY. Most of the time to joints you don't want to.


wish i had these kind of detailed explanations to learn from when i first painted weights.

I learnt it the hard way too... hik..hik...:banghead::banghead::banghead:

Oooh I'm so tired. Those morning cafein took all my energy away.....


Ft

[mustique]

I too learned much about skin weight editing via this forums.
But after struggling endless hours, I came to the conclusion that a dense model with
smart bone placement solves most of the problem. Now smart bone placement also involves putting in extra bind objects (since v7.0).

After the smoothbind, without editing anything, adding influence objects on the hips, shoulders, fingers, knee, elbows solves most of the problems. There are only a few things left to edit (mainly the head and jaw) if you do it right.

Of course the resulting rig gets a bit heavy, but that's no big problem when you have a fairly good machine and don't export to game engines. That being said, I still think tough that maya desperately needs much better skin binding/editing tools.

For example there's a too called "pose deformer" from michael comet. Very cool idea.

[supersteve3d]

...
If you would care for it, I've been using Maya to bind characters as a character rigger and modeler for years and can post my workflow. If you follow it carefully it will prevent this ever happening to you again.

Hi vine,

I for one would love to hear about your skinning workflow. All of us are always keen to hear new tips. :)

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