Hi all,
I have rigged all my assets with max influence of 5.
but now i have to set the max influence to 4 on my characters due to engines requirements. (cryengine 3)
is there any easy way to do this without messing up the rig and avoiding re-rigging the character?
i tried to prune the weights, but no luck!
thanks,
Hoss
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You need to selectively bring it down to 4 weights-per-vertex yourself. As you see, just going down to 4 influences rarely gives desirable results.
I haven’t skinned in Maya in years, but when I was in Max I had some function to select all the verts with 5 or more influences. Then I’d adjust some of them to bring it down to 4 influences, select the bad ones and repeat, until I had no verts with more than 4 influences. THEN you can prune weights to get rid of the zero (or close to zero) weights.
Max does a better job of prune/holding weights, you could use max and then come back to Maya since max weights fail in other areas.
There are scripts and things that lets you find max influences and auto fix them but there isn’t a great workflow for this still that I have seen and makes weighting for games still a big pain in Maya if you are not doing all the weights by hand from the start.
Short answer, no fast fix.
Thanks guys for your answers.
I agree with you. its a pain.
I ended up pruning a little bit and then re-weighting the bad vertices.
another question : i am working with a game engine and it requires 4 for max influence. does max care about max influence? i mean if i export the same character from max, do i actually avoid the max influence?? or do i then get a problem in the engine?
Thanks,
Hoss
the skin modifier has a setting on it to limit the max influences that you can set and it interactivly prunes the weights (much like the update weights in Maya does) a bit better than Maya I think but there is no undo for it once you set the value.
I’ve got a script somewhere that could help with this and I’ve been meaning to look at adding it to bonus tools… just lets you specify an arbitrary integer for your max influences and then parses the mesh for any verts with influences greater than the value and dumps them into an array. You can then walk through the selection and prune out the influences you don’t want.
The other option is before you skin your mesh is to tick off Maintain Max Influences in the skinning options and set it to 4. This will tell Maya to only allow 4 influences per vertex so long as that option is enabled on the skinCluster.
[QUOTE=katetsu;14284]another question : i am working with a game engine and it requires 4 for max influence. does max care about max influence? i mean if i export the same character from max, do i actually avoid the max influence?? or do i then get a problem in the engine?[/QUOTE]
The 4 weight influence exists so the weights for a vert can be packed more efficiently for hardware (shader) skinning. In theory you could support more pretty easily, in practice it’s rarely been done (but will be done more in the future I think).
If you are using software skinning- which you are in Max- there is no limit to influences. You could also use hardware skinning and then one can break up meshes in various ways automatically, but there are lots of implicit costs that make that impractical for games but potentially better than software skinning in DCC apps.
But then Maya skinning tools still freak out about maintain max influences. Shawn I know you have been working over a few versions to fix this but Maya skinning is still a egg shell nightmare for games.
Bonus tools fine, but I still say the core logic for how the skin cluster interpolates weights and deals with influences is either broken or out of date. Maybe there isn’t anyone left in Autodesk that knows what dark magic lives in the code between Max, Maya and Softimage but it would kind of kick ass to have something come out of that that is even close to http://www.ngskintools.com/ and the other tools that I have talked with you about in the past.
The only currently egg shell thing I am aware of is the smooth brush and that’s just because of how it’s implemented in Artisan (it only samples the currently selected influence, smooths that and then normalizes the rest when it should sample all influences in the area and distribute the smooth evenly). Aside from that I made sure to squash as many of those annoying max influences bugs as I could in the latest service pack so if you spot something let me know so I can squash it as well 
I agree on the mirroring statement that asymmetrical meshes and general mirroring is a bit of a pain and layering would certainly be cool but I’d be curious to know what the “sticking” points are for people. Personally I’ve only ever experienced skinning issues related to the smooth brush and took it out of my workflow 8 years ago and use purely Add/Scale for weighting and haven’t had an issue skinning characters since.
bug: smooth skin weights- if you turn off respect max influence in the tool, it runs and turns off the max influence setting on the skin cluster! with out warning, so now you run that thinking that the max inf. is set and now you spend time skinning and realize it wasn’t locked to max inf. of 4.
The option not re-enabling itself is a bug but the workflow strikes me as bad… if you’re smoothing and telling it to not obey Max Influences then you’ve defeated the purpose of having Maintain Max Influences on in the first place.
Yes, but currently in the 2012 if you have max influences on, then weight hammer and smooth skin weights don’t do anything, so I turned it of to see the result but then discovered the skin cluster setting was turned off as well.
Mirror still is hit or miss on respecting max influences. It does mostly but then out of the blue it doesn’t.
Weight Hammer is definitely fixed with MMI in 2012 SP2 as I verified the fix myself for a customer. Smooth Weights should work fine as well as it was an issue in how the weights got assigned/normalized which fixed a couple areas.
Only thing that could cause Mirror to do that would be the Normalize option I’d imagine…
got in installed finally:) will check it out.
hmm here is a video showing the broken right after installing and trying a basic skin and trying to use the weight hammer and the smooth skin tools.
Thanks guys,
i really appreciate your responds.
First of all, if i was going to rig them now, i would choose 4 for sure.
the problem is that i got them with max influence 5.
I am working on a script that would show me the bad vertices and then i can manually re-weight them. but keeping in mind that i have to re-rig 500 characters within the next 3 months, this tool has to be very fast.
But still working on it.
-. it would be awesome if autodesk could offer a more user-friendly weight table for all the vertices.
i wish i had more time!
Thanks anyway for your support,
Hoss
Looking at that video Brad it appears Hammer is working locally but once you apply the smooth weights it’s doing it to the whole mesh and not just the components you have selected. I’ll have a look at the Smooth Skin Weights as to what’s going on but hammer should not bypass maintain max influences now unless someone magically broke it again before SP2 went live.
Hammer and Smooth both cause the entire mesh to jump, after the jump, both tools have 0 effect on the mesh, selected vertices or object level, selected verts seem to be being ignored when max influence is active.
Coming back to this - I hit the weight hammer issue this weekend rushing to skin a last minute character for GDC and I saw the ‘pop’ you mention. Oddly enough it only happened when I checked Maintain Max Influences and performed the operation. If I re-skinned my mesh with it on from the start I didn’t get the same result. I’m traveling the next two weeks but I’ve got a bug in against the problem.
@katetsu: I met the same problem very recently (also rigging for the CryEngine3) and found a great script by David Hunt to highlight such vertices. You can find it in this tutorial on my site.
