Rigging Questions - Maya
polycounter lvl 14
I've managed to create myself a rig and control rig. I'm pretty happy with it! I have a finalish question.
How does the skinning work exactly? In the past I've selected hierarchy>grabbed mesh>smooth bind. The character I have now is broken up into pieces. What I would like to do is select specific bones>select according mesh>smooth bind. I would need to do this 16 times in total.
Is there any reason I wouldn't do this? The other method I guess would be to select hierarchy>select all pieces>smooth bind>then flood influences for each separate piece, etc.
If I were to bind each piece separate, am I added each piece individually to the same overall bind or something? or am I creating multiple binds, which is maybe more expensive, or cause problems somehow? Hell if I know! If you could share the best approach for this specific instance, and why, I would be very interested to know.
Thanks guys!
How does the skinning work exactly? In the past I've selected hierarchy>grabbed mesh>smooth bind. The character I have now is broken up into pieces. What I would like to do is select specific bones>select according mesh>smooth bind. I would need to do this 16 times in total.
Is there any reason I wouldn't do this? The other method I guess would be to select hierarchy>select all pieces>smooth bind>then flood influences for each separate piece, etc.
If I were to bind each piece separate, am I added each piece individually to the same overall bind or something? or am I creating multiple binds, which is maybe more expensive, or cause problems somehow? Hell if I know! If you could share the best approach for this specific instance, and why, I would be very interested to know.
Thanks guys!
Replies
First thing I do is create just a skeleton and bind the mesh to it. Save that as a "skin" file and reference it into a new scene. In that scene, build a control rig on top of it. Constrain the skin skeleton to the control rig so it follows along but at any point you should be able to cut the constraints and be left with just the skeleton and the mesh. You won't be separating them like that, but they do need to be their own mostly autonomous pieces that aren't all tangled up together.
[spoiler]Sometimes you want the control rig while you're skinning so it's ok to ref it into your skin file and temporarily constrain your skeleton to it, but you strip all that out when you're done.[/spoiler]
Then I reference the skin skeleton and control rig into a new scene for the animators to work with. They grab just the skin skeleton and export animations from it.
I would combine the meshes that share the same material. That way you limit the number separate objects in your final export which will help keep down the number of draw calls you're character generates.
He's all on the same material. What I ended up doing was instead of one smooth bind for everything, and sorting out the weighting after was to bind to selected joints. This made the weighting process very simple as it wasn't considering all the neighbouring pieces. The geometry is very broken up. The legs, arm, head, shell pieces, shoulder armour, wings are all floating. I think this approach is what made me skin it this way, but if best practice says merge all meshes and spend the time painting weights then I will.
In regards to my question aboot how skinning actually works, I was wondering about more under the hood. I noticed that each skinning I did in Maya created a new skin cluster. I was wondering if the multiples of those make it to Unity and if that matters or not?
Thanks!