Maya Skinning Woes

Rigging
1

So… we have some 20-40k meshes that need to be skinned, but this is proving difficult and time consuming in Maya.

I was told to make a lower res mesh and skin that then transfer weights, why is maya so sluggish with somewhat larger meshes? I see the skin deformer isn’t multi-threaded, but it’s something else as well. My skin tools just crawl on slightly larger meshes, as do the built in tools…

I have heard there’s an improved way to transfer weights by like closest point on surface or something (sounds like transfer maps), but I can’t find this. Are people talking about the transfer attributes stuff? This isn’t working for us.

Thanks,

2

Sounds more like you want “Copy Skin Weights” under Edit Smooth Skin. Paint weights on a lower mesh, like 5K, then copy weights to the higher res one.

The copy weights option copies weights from one skinned mesh to another. To do it in one step you can try something like this:



{
string $sel[] = `ls -sl`;

if (size($sel) == 2) {
   string $cluster = `findRelatedSkinCluster $sel[0]`;
   string $joints[] = `listConnections -s 1 -d 0 ($cluster + ".matrix")`;
   select -r $sel[1];
   select -add $joints;
   SmoothBindSkin -tsb -ta;
   string $newCluster = `findRelatedSkinCluster $sel[1]`;
   copySkinWeights -ss $cluster -ds $newCluster -nm -sa "closestPoint" -ia "oneToOne" -ia "closestJoint";
}

Stev

3

You can try using michael comet tools. This way you can save weights and apply them to your hires ones.

I am not sure about the closest point. I rather use ray cast since its much more developed and thats how maya did it back ehen it started.

Cheers,
Hoss