bizarre skinning behavior


#1

Hi everyone, I finished skinning a character 2 or 3 days ago in Maya 2011 and when I came back to the same saved file some really strange things started happening.

If I move the controls of the character everything looks completely normal. It’s skinned just like it was when I finished it, except if I open the Paint Skin Weights tool or select some vertices and open the Component Editor Maya says some vertices are being affected by joints that I know have no influence over them. For example, it says my head joint is influencing some vertices on the tail, but if I move the head joint it works just like normal, where it only affects the head area where I skinned it and it doesn’t move anything on the tail.

Another thing I tried is to add an influence joint for the leg to see what would happen, so I created the influence joint, painted on the weights and tried to move it but it’s not affecting any of the vertices I painted. So as another test I painted the entire leg to be 100% influenced by the influence joint and another weird thing happened. It only moves a few vertices on the leg, but not the whole thing, and it also somehow started influencing random vertices all over the entire character that I didn’t paint.

Anyone have any idea what’s going? Thanks.


#2

Hi…!
Chk the skinClusters normalize option.
Rgds,


#3

The normalize option is set to Interactive. I tried changing it to None and Post but it didn’t affect anything. It still thinks joints are influencing the wrong vertices even though I’m 100% sure that they’re not really influencing them.

As another test I grabbed 3 vertices on the body and told them to be influenced to the head joint by 100%, but when I move the head joint it only moves 2 out of the 3 vertices even though Maya says all 3 are influenced 100% by the head.

This is so strange. Maya’s never done this before.


#4

I fixed it!! I duplicated the geometry, bound the new geometry to the joints, then used Maya’s Copy Skin Weights tool to transfer the weights from the old geometry onto the newly duplicated geometry and now everything is back to normal. I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place or why this would fix it, but I’m glad it did!


#5

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