help mirroring skin weights

#1

I’m a newb when it comes to rigging so I need some help I want to transfer the weights from my finished left hand to my right hand but it’s not all part of one skeleton, so I’m not able to do this. How do I go about transferring the weights from this right joint set to the equivalent topology in the left:

#2

Have you tried maya’s mirror skin weights? It doesn’t matter if you there are separate joint chains. The hope is just that it is all one skinCluster.
The settings for the mirror skin weights tool can give you varying levels of mirror quality.
My standard settings aren’t the default ones as I find the default gives problems with areas with joints on top of each other. I use “Closest Point on Surface” as my influence association and then “One to One” as my first influence association and “Joint” as my second.
This works well for single meshes with joints labeled “R_name” “L_name”.
EDIT: Oh and this mirrors ALL the weights…don’t think you can only mirror select joint weights with this tool.

Hope this helps.
~Ben

#3

i use the same settings for mirroring, thos are most commonly used !

  • prior to maya2011 , i always selected all vertecies for both hands , and simply did mirrorSkinweights .
  • since in maya2011 some skinning-operations changed ( dualQuaternionSkinning + weightBlending ) in order to even mirror the weightBlending , you now need to just select the vertecies , of the bad-weights hand , and then mirror

having a broken hierarchy for the joints , does at least not matter , when it comes to mirroring

@edit:
one thing you can check as well :
are all joints of the entire skeleton in your skincluster ? maybe your forgot some of the right-hand joints , when smoothBinding

@edit2:
i personally would create the spine-joints , in one straight line , and not in a S-curve … it produces better deformations !

#4

oh - so you can just select the topology on both sides and isolate the mirroring to those areas?

#5

well, you select the vertecies of the mesh ( dont select the joints , when mirroring ( i see in your screenshot , that you selected the joints ) .

usually you can partially mirror the weights ( e.g. just the hands / or just areas of the face , you want - e.g. the eye-loops ) .

since there is in maya2011 the possibility to use “dual-quaternion”-skinning … and you can also “blend” the dualQuaternion-weights with the classical skincluster-weights , they changed one thing for the mirroring : if you want to mirror a “blendweighted” skincluster , in order to properly mirror also the “blendweights” , you just select the vertecies of your bad-skinned hand, maya will then look at each vertex , and tries to find the equivalent vertex on the other side ( the side where you already painted your weights ) , of yourse you still need to define if mirrored from x to -x or vice versa .

greetings
sim.On

#6

Disregard post…
I was having the same problem, but then figured out that I need to select the target verts, not the source verts.
Thanks.

#7

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