While it’s helpful to know I can manually skin the mesh, its not really solved my problem.
The first time I went through the rigging process with ART, my mesh pieces had seemingly automatically been smooth bound by the time I got to the deformation setup stage. I didn’t get all my weight painting done in the first sitting, so what I did was save out my skin weights with the expectation I could reapply them next time I opened up the program. The issue I face now arose because I missed exporting the weights for one of the mesh pieces, and when I move through the process again, the program automatically binds and weights all the mesh pieces that it can find saved weights for, but completely ignores the one piece that does not. I was requesting to know how ART designates the pieces to be skinned in this process so that I could make sure this extra piece was added, as my attempts to manually add the lone mesh with smooth bind after this stage have caused issue, and using your suggestion of manually skinning the mesh with smooth bind seemingly doesn’t allow me to import the weight information I’ve done previously without disastrous results.
I’ve got an inkling that if I could simply add this mesh piece to the existing skincluster created after it automatically imports the weighting, all would be swell, but I can’t find any information on doing that. And I really have had a look. So if you think you understand how it is I’m going awry, I’d really appreciate the help.