Rigging - Influence object / exporting skin weights problem

[Technofreak]

i had trouble exporting/importing weights also, always
screws up when importing back, never figured out why
but for the first problem...u may want to try this:
before u try adding any more influences , select the root of your
character and perhaps all the other influence objects...
then goto modify-enable nodes-dissable all ...
then go to skin-goto bind pose ..this should snap it
back to the time when u bound it...after this try applying
the new influences and enable all nodes at the end

[MDuffy]

Maya's built-in method for saving and restoring weights through maps is just stupid. Don't use it. Instead use the saveWeights script that Big Idea released onto www.highend3d.com. Much nicer.

Hope this helps,
Michael Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net

[a3dmonkey]

Thanks much Technofreak and MDuffy,

I ended up going back a few versions onhte bind and discovered that I bound it when the arm was at -.146 so I relly wasn't at the bind spot. Sigh ... well I moved it .. and added the influence objects without any problems. It was my booboo binding that led me on this goose chase.

As to the suggestions I'm going to file them away in my save my ass bag of tricks. I'm definently going to play around with ther highend script later tonight and see what kind of results I can get. Is sad but the Maya tools for this are just unreliable. Thanks again.


Michael Ware
SVA Grad Candidate


:buttrock:

[stzaske]

I've always wondered about that. I've also had lots of problems exporting weights, usually stuff on the edges gets screwed up...but does AW really just build something like a UV map, a TIF or JPG with the weights colored in black and white?

I think that's what they do, and it seems REALLY goofy. Why not just give us a way to export the data like a spreadsheet?

MDuffy, your response got me excited to look for the script your refering to. I've been wanting to export a bunch of weights, and have little confidence in AW's exporter/importer. I'll be really excited if it supports cluster weights too.

-=STZ=-

[magilla]

skinClusterInfluence 1 "- ibp -ug -dr 4 -ps 0 -ns 10";


most of this is the standard mel dross when you bind a mesh - except for this gem "-ibp"

it just Ignores the Bind Pose when rebinding your mesh - if you bake history when you detach your mesh this works just fine, cos it bakes the altered position of the verts into your mesh - so your future bindpose would now have all bones zero'd.

btw - ditto on the weightexport tool - Maya version using maps is ridiculous and doesn't work if you alter in any way your mesh or bones - I was very surprised that even a Maya representative couldn't offer a better way to deal with weight import/export - they are obviously unaware of this weight tool.


--magilla

[sp0rk3d]

magilla

I haven't actually tried using it in a long time but i was told that it did work after modeling changes, i think that it requires a good uvmap to work right... the reason for the map method is that if you are more likely to add/remove geomitry ie. face-path-split etc... this would renumber your verts rendering all spread sheet / vert number weights useless... however the "map" method should still work after renumbering assumming you still have the basicaly the same uvmap....

but if you say that it doesn't work after modeling changes.... then it really sux.... i just thought that was the reason for haveing the "Maps"

not that i am saying that i use the A|W defualt export weight maps... if i had a choice i would choose to NOT use maya's defualt weight maps...

[MasonDoran]

i am trying the Save Weights tool....but i keep getting this:

// Error: source "C:\gi2weights.mel"; //
// Error: Cannot find file "C:gi2weights.mel" for source statement. //

its clear to save the weights....but i cannot get the script to load them!

[MDuffy]

2byts, you are using a backslash in your pathname. You need to use a forward slash like c:/gi2weights.mel. The backslash is an escape character in C programming (and most script languages) and it's kinda stupid that MS decided way-back-when to use it as a directory separator.

As far as the bindPose problems go, I usually just delete the bindPose node when it gives me trouble. We always set up our rigs so that their transforms are frozen and setting values to 0 will put them back in the "bind pose". So the actual bindPose node doesn't do anything for us.

If you have anything in your rig geometry constrained, then bindPose doesn't work well with it.

Later,
Michael Duffy
mduffy@ionet.net

[GrafOrlok]

I'm using a script from Highend3d called transferWeights.mel. It's saved my day numerous times. It is for Maya 3, but I used it the other week on 4.5 and it worked perfect. Just bind the new skin and run the mel and you'll get a UI asking for source geometry name and target geometry name, hit ok and it's done! Can't be any easier.

edit: checking closer the mel was called transfer_weights_v.mel

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