Changing normals on skinned character

#1

I have a really poorly skinned character and I need to change the normals on one of its hands. How can I invert those normals without detaching the skin? If I detach I’ll never be able to get that skin back on as a result of doing a really poor job normalizing transformations and hooking up IK systems.

Thanks.

#2

Enter component mode and select all of the faces you want to invert and fix the normals like your normally would, disregard the fact that the character is skinned, it doesnt matter. Then you can use edit/ delete all by type/ no deformer history. This way your normal adjustment history is wiped but you still have the skin and any deformers.

#3

I wanted to drop a line to say that once you have a character skinned there are a few options to be able to re-skin that character any time you might need to. I haven’t seen a case where the only option was to rebind a character from scratch. Maybe, worst case scenario the transfered weights aren’t perfect…but it isn’t starting over.
Two options included in vanilla maya are:

  1. Copy Skin Weights…pretty straight forward and works no matter regardless of your UVs or point order.
  2. Export Skin Weight Maps: You need your UVs laid out for this one…and the same on both meshes. A good way to have a backup of your skin weights outside of a maya file…just in case.

Bonus: Comet Save Weights is a great point order based weight saving script…

fghajhe was right on with his suggested approach…I just wanted to let you know there are options other than detaching and losing everything.
Good luck!

#4

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