I’m wondering if there’s a way to access skindata meshs’ data. Particularly what bones are being used.
In my pipeline there are several artists working in a bunch of different scene files on individual parts and eventually merging meshes and skinning from other files all the time.
Most of the time they’ve been saving separate files to store only the skindata meshes from SkinUtils and geometry of a collection of objects. I’m working on a script that loads the objects from the scene and imports the skindata back onto it - but i’ve run into a snag where there’s no automatic way of telling which bones were used on the skin modifier since they’re all collapsed
So I was wondering if there was a way to access that skin data to extract this info, but it seems like it might not be. Any ideas? :):
If you are wondering what the bone names were that is stored in the skin data you can get to that by way of the user properties on the skinData mesh.
You can right-click the object and go to the Object Properties and select the User Defined tab. There you will see the map channel list and the bones weights that are associated with each map channel.
If you open the Channel Info tool, under the Tools menu you can see this same list of map channels on the mesh.
I believe the number of map channels created used to store the skinData is determined by the (number of bones / 3). Three bones are represented in each map channel. So if you have a mesh with 4 bones in the skin modifier it would create two map channels.
You may have to check the number of map channels on the object to determine how to access the number of map channel user properties properly.
In the attached picture the following would return the SkinWeight bone name.