I’m orginally a Maya Rigger and have recently moved to a Max based production.
Without knowing much about the skinning tools in Max, I’m trying to deside, if I should attempt to do my skinning in Max or rather setup a dual pipeline and do my weighting in Maya.
I’m looking to do a Paint based workflow, which I’m very comfortable with in Maya. I’ve seen people setting weights in Max by selecting verts individually and then inputting numbers… and that’s not going to happen :-o (maybe when doing blocking)
About that: When trying to bring weighting information from maya->.fbx->max, it does not seem to take (I retain the weighting already in the max scene). Any pointers?
(I’m using the default fbx import and export settings in max and maya respectively and I’m using max 2010, maya 2011 and fbx 2011.03)
in my opinion, max’s painting tools work fine. and i’m a long lost maya lover. i haven’t done much skinning in maya since maya 2008, so there’s my disclaimer, but max has better mirroring tools and i also prefer max’s weight tool to maya’s component editor (even though you are talking specifically about painting weights). transferring over by FBX sounds like more trouble than just spending a day messing with the tools to get to the point where you’re comfortable with them.
make sure you turn off all of the crappy capsule envelope stuff. i have a script that sets skin properties to turn off all the crap so that i can just worry about weighting … you could make this a macroscript if you wanted and bind it to a hotkey (i use it through the utility panel so that’s why it’s in the format that it is). bone limit is set to 4 for game engine dependencies. max sets it to 20 by default (haha).
fn jc_setSkinProperties =
(
meshes = selection as array
for obj in meshes do
(
obj.modifiers[#Skin].showNoEnvelopes = on
obj.modifiers[#Skin].filter_vertices = on
obj.modifiers[#Skin].bone_Limit = 4
)
)
jc_setSkinProperties()
Thanks for the input and the code I’ll definitely look into max skinning.
Any additional view’s on Maya vs. max skinning would be great! I also need to find out how I get max to update it’s skinning to what’s in the fbx file you import…
[QUOTE=Sune;7639]Any additional view’s on Maya vs. max skinning would be great! I also need to find out how I get max to update it’s skinning to what’s in the fbx file you import…[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure that’s possible, but I haven’t investigated it much. You can import the mesh and bones and everything into Max and use Skin Utilities to transfer the weight from the FBX mesh to the original Max mesh. It creates a separate mesh with the weight information on channels, so you can even just import that SkinData_mesh anywhere you want. It’s also quite handy to do skinning on lower resolution LODs.
If I’m importing the skin information from Maya I generally import the FBX into a new scene, extract the skin data with Skin Utilities, save the scene and merge just the skin data on the original scene.
Personally I find the paint weight on Maya much better than on Max (the smooth tool in particular). But to do vertex by vertex weighting I think Max weight table is slightly easier than the component editor.
Has anyone used Bones Pro for skinning in Max? I have an animator who was interested in it, but I’m skeptical of how useful it is. It looks like its per-vertex weighting tools are rather poor from the video demos. In the end, we’d have to convert everything back to skin for export purposes anyway.
One of the TA’s on the other project here was able to modify one of our save vert weights scripts and came up with a work flow that work best for him. You will need the latest crosswalk plugin installed.
In Max:
Export the character to FBX and bake animations.
In Maya:
Import the mesh, in inches. When finished painting weights in Maya export as Crosswalk XSI. This will preserve the vert order so that you can save and load weights properly within 3dsmax.
In Max:
Import the file as crosswalk and uncheck every option box. Once it is in max we have a little script that will save out each vert index, associated vert bones, and vert weights for each bone. We write that weight data out to a text file. Next we load up the original 3dsmax skinned character and run our load weights script pointing to the file that we just wrote out and the weights generally load 1 to 1. Keep in mind that we are using max Skin to save and load vert weights.
Making sure your vert order is preserved between the I\O process ensures that this process works. Credit for the work flow goes to our former TA Mat Berglund. Hope this helps.
So I did a few tests and so far vertex numbering seems consistent between meshes in max and those transfered to maya with fbx. If this is a reliable assumption (?!?) I think this is a prime candidate for writing my own little max<->maya weighting I/O script, storing the weights out to an external file. I need to get my head around maxscript anyway
For now, importing the mesh from maya into max via fbx, baking the weighting on a SkinData mesh and then bringing that into my maxscene, sound like a plan
Sune, have you tried just running the FBX plugin as UPDATE SCENE so that it only loads data on to existing nodes in max? You should be able to “refresh” the weights with out having to do the skindata, but it has been a while since I have been in max so I might be off.
So I’m fbx exporting a skinned cylinder from max and then importing that into max again. No matter what I seem to do the weights are all over the place once back in max…
I’ve tried this with a skinned primitive, an editable mesh, editable poly and a mesh with an edit poly modifier… Any pointers??
For some reason, the fbx file on import will not add the skin mod back to existing geo or update it correctly.
If you leave your existing max skeleton but delete your mesh, when you import back in the new skinning FBX will load the mesh and the skin mod with the update weights.
This says bug in the FBX code or a misunderstanding on what it should update for max mod. stack.
Why not just bite the bullet and write your own intermediate format?
Had to do that for XSI to Max pipe years ago. And while not the best thing in the world it was something I had complete control over and can massage to fit the pipe as needed.
Any pointers??