Skinning question

#1

Do influence objects take away influence from other joints when painted for weights?Can this be avoided?

I have a skinned character(body,face,everything) and I have to put feature points(controls that affect the mesh directly,i.e. move the navel feature point control it makes the dude fat around the navel).But I don’t want to give influence to the feature points while taking away the influence of the joints.Ideally I’d like to transfer part of the influence as it is from the joint to the feature point control.

#2

hi, im not entirely sure what you are asking. Are the additional influence objects joints as well?
Because if they are you can chose (in the skinning options) how many bones are allwoed to influence each vertex. So if you set the value to lets say 5 you can have 5 different joints pull on the same vertex. By painting the weights you can direct which joints control which vertices.

#3

i know all that.my problem was that the influence objects which where curve objects btw took influence away from other joints.i hadn’t realised that basically each vertex goes from 0-1 and each joint takes up a portion of that range.i thought each joint could go from 0-1 on each vertex.at first i had a skinned character and added the influence objects later and when i painted their weights,all the refined weights i had painted for the joints were messed up.

i wanted to know if there’s a way for the influence objects to be on a different weight map.kinda like wire deformers.when painting wire deformer weights they don’t affect the weights on the joints.they have their own map.but it’s better to remove influence from the joints so that you don’t have double transformations.anyway in the end i found a way to fix this.

my only reserve now is whether i can make performance better if i change the curve objects to joints since the curve objects resemble joints in shape.

#4

you can link the deformation made by the object influence through a blendshape so wont take part in the skincluster

#5

my bachelor has two versions for facial animation and the second is no joints in the head and the use of blendshapes so when i started doing that i realized it and have already done it at least for the head.

i didn’t do it for the body because it was all one geometry and fairly high poly to drop performance for a blendshape as big as that.

now i’m redoing the skinning since i’ve cut the geometry into pieces so if it gets to that i’ll probably do it that way.thx though!

#6

I guess it depends what is your goal , if it s for personal project keep up the perfomanc and try to keep it light ,

But if you are in production usually the high versions of the rigs are pretty slow but are used only for caching purpose

#7

well it’s for a bachelor thesis and the purpose is to rig and animate a character with two versions of facial animation(one with joints and one with pure blendshapes) to then export in COLLADA and test the COLLADA format.that’s it.simple stuff rigging wise.problem was i had no experience in graphics when i started this bachelor and the model i found was in fairly high poly meaning too much detail for a noob at painting weights like me and many problems along the way mostly because of my inexperience.i.e the reason for this reskinning is because the initial model was in too many parts which made it difficult to skin.then i made everything into one geometry but when it was time for the facial blendshapes i couldn’t duplicate just the face.so first geo separation then reskinning(mostly through copy weights from previous versions not the whole thing).but then sth happened to the skin cluster…i don’t know ,maya bullshit(excuse the lang) and i had to redo the work because i couldn’t see the weights in component editor(all blank).
so i decided to cut the body into smaller pieces but definitely more than the initial so here i am now.after having skinned two or three versions already…along the way you pick up on things but sometimes it’s too damn late.

#8

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