skinweighting buttons etc in maya

Ruz

so yeah what's the best way to do this, don't want buttons stretching, but also don't want the position to change, which they are liable to do if I weight them 100 percent to 1 bone

maybe skinwrap any buttons, clips etc?

Bartalon

If you have multiple buttons and you want them to move individually, you will need one joint per button.

Select all the vertices, go to Window > General Editors > Component Editor

Select the Smooth Skins tab at the top

Find the appropriate joint from the columns and set all those values to 1. You can select a range almost like an Excel spreadsheet so you can select the first cell, scroll all the way to the bottom, hold shift and select the last cell to change all of them at once.

Any values from other joints set to 0.

Ruz

yeah I knew about the component editor, but its not really a case of me wanting them to move them individually. they should move with the cloth, but not deform if you get what i mean.

if I set the weight of a button to 1 to say the chest, then it will slide about

also is there an easy way to mirror a pose in maya( say left arm and right arm), it's damn easy in max

JohnnyRaptor

what exactly is this for Rus, is this for an ingame asset or offline render?

Ruz

its for a personal project, just messing about really JohnnyRaptor, suffice to say I would like need to keep the extra bits as is.
I wonder if some kind of point constraint might work
or maybe the extra elements stretching a little won't be a big deal.

skinwrap may just be the best option though

Neox

make sure you have your topology lining up with the buttons, if you have a vertex underneath it you can just copy the weighting over from that vertex onto your entire button

Ruz

sounds cool neox, will give it a try cheers

EDIT - awesome, component editor is my friend, thanks for the feedback guys

also I realised why I couldn't copy the keyframes of my characters arm symmetrically, it's because I was keying in scale, rotation and translation instead of just rotation doh

TeZzy

If this is not for a game asset then you could rivet a vertex or a face that you want the button to follow. I normally use HZrivet which you can find here or djRivet.

Ruz

It's not for a game asset so that's very handy
cheers TeZzy

TeZzy

No problem you will find it useful for many situations