Anyone here who’s done character work through Maya, specifically painting weights? I’ve been working on a character recently and have come across a few annoying issues when it comes to the programs skin painting. Aside from the whack a mole approach when unlocking more than 1 joint at a time, I’ve come across an issue where weights aren’t being locked even when all joints are.
Here’s the problem, I have a character who’s eyes somehow got the UVs screwed up. It’s attached to the overall model, so I figured I would delete the old ones and place the new ones in there, then bind the new eyes to the skeleton. However just from deleting the faces of the eyes in the model, it causes several joints to screw up their skin weights. Some parts of the face are now painted to the arm joints, and vice versa. This all from just deleting faces on the skinned model, even though the joints were all locked. Is this supposed to happen, or is it a bug? I’ve only ever used maya, but the way this program handles skin weights is incredibly frustrating. My plan was to make it where I could have different attachments or swappable accessories/faces for the character but seeing how much of an issue just replacing eyeballs is leads me to believe there has to be either a better way, or maybe I’m doing something wrong? Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
In Maya you always have to detach the mesh from the joint (unskin the mesh) before you delete it…
If you delete the mesh while skinned to the skeleton then bugs might happen.
I would just export the weight maps, detach the skins, delete old mesh then attach skins and copy weight back from exported maps.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll be sure to do that next time. I tried exporting and importing the weight maps before but that deformed my mesh horribly. I seem to be able to get around my original issue by binding a new version of the whole character with the fixed eyes, and just copying the weights from the old one.
I am in kind of same spot. Trying to learn that whole skinning thing. I bought Mila Jovovich head mesh (it looks almost like Alice from resident evil movies). For learning , and fun factor, she will make perfect head for main hero in some zombie game that i am making.
So far i watched some tutorials about skinning in maya, 3ds and blender. Maya and 3ds are unnecessarily complicated from what i seen so far. I will try blender.
Yeah I’m a bit surprised at how the skin weights are in Maya given how straight forward it is with everything else. I managed to get around it, but it was definitely frustrating and IMO unnecessarily complicated.
Autodesk’s soft skinning tech is ancient.
I started to learn it when Final Fantasy X was released and they said on interviews the game was modeled on Maya.
Since back then the way they do it in Maya hasn’t changed a bit. I quickly learned to limit my soft skin influences to a max of 2 bones to avoid this kind of problem…
And using the “flood” influences a lot to reset any “buggy” vertex to zero (black)