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View Full Version : Norman Face Verts pull away

byranx
08-03-2008, 10:01 PM
Hi I have sort of a strange problem with the Norman Rig. I was animating him just fine and I shut down Maya because my PC was having some issues. I open back up the scene file and Norman's front face verts are pointed downward as if one of the controllers or influences was thrown completely out of place. As far as I can tell, it started happening near the end of my blocking run through and right before I started flattening tangents. I honestly don't what happened....not sure if a controller's attribute got keyed that shouldn't have. It didn't happen while I originally had the scene open, only when I reopened Maya. I scrapped preferences but nothing new. The face verts are fine a few scenes back but I'm up to redoing the poses without knowing exactly what caused the issue.

I attached images and the link below is where you can open the scene files. In 10_RoughBlocking.mb...the verts should be fine. 14_VertsMessedUp.mb is where I am currently at. Thank you very much for anyone who can solve this asap

http://brm0700.cias.rit.edu/NormanIssue_scenes.zip

-Brian
edwardG
08-04-2008, 02:15 PM
What happened was that your skin clusters (painted weights) were messed up. You'll have to take the scene where he is working correctly, then in the layers window uncheck the "R" next to his head, and go to skin > edit smooth skin > export skin weights. Save them to a location that you'll remember. Then, you'll need to go into the messed up file, un-check the "R" nest to the head again, then select the head and go to skin > edit smooth skin > import skin weights. Load them from where you saved them, and that *Might* work.

I think it might be best just to start from the previous save, however, because with all the time you've spent trying to restore what you had, you could have re-done the animation and probably have done it better (I find that I do animations much better the second time around).

Good luck!
Dichotomy
08-04-2008, 02:51 PM
just a couple quick things about export skin weights (in case you haven't used them), they are black and white images written per joint, and based on the UV layout of the object. So you'll need to have his head unwrapped for the export skinweights feature to work; even an automatic unwrap should be fine. if he's not unwrapped already, that could cause issues between your scenes, unless you transfer the UV's also.
and with the maps, the higher the resolution you have the more accurate the map will be, i typically try to stay at/above 2048 depending on what the UV layout looks like.
But for all that work, i would agree with edwardG, go back to when your scene worked, paint your weight, and re-animate... probably cause less headaches in the end.
byranx
08-04-2008, 03:39 PM
Well luckily it wasn't too much work...I ended up just going back to the previous working scene and imported the newer scene and copied and pasted curves between corresponding controllers. Took a little bit of time but it was a quick fix. It seemed like a weighting issue but then again...I didn't know whether messing with the weights of a referenced model was going to come back to bite me at a later point. Thanks for the tips on exporting the weights though.

-Brian
Keithtron
08-04-2008, 03:52 PM
Glad you were able to fix your problem.

Just as a side node, there's a very helpful tool that allows you to save/load skin weights based on vertex number and/or position. It helps a lot when dealing with geometry that hasn't been UV'ed or has UV's that have changed. It's in the Comet MEL script package at: http://www.comet-cartoons.com/melscript.php
Dichotomy
08-04-2008, 05:08 PM
oh, very nice. Thanks for the heads up Keithtron, im definitely going to check that out.
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