skinning skin tight clothes Maya

rorozilla

Hey you guys! I'm working on an Avatar system right now. I'm skinning some clothes onto the Avatar and some of it is pretty skin tight. the geometry matches up with the body underneath, so I would want the skinning info to be pretty much pasted form the body to the clothing, is there an easy way of doing this?

Things you should know:

- I'm using Maya 2012
- the avatar is meant to go in unity
-Every piece of cloths is a separate mesh. So up until now, its been pretty tedious skinning on mesh and then going to the other to match up vert by vert.
-I'm pretty much self taught on Maya skinning, so there a lot of features I don't know about. So assume I'm pretty oblivious to any kind of tool that could be helping me right now.

rorozilla

I have an additional probleme with the Mirror tool, it seams it dosent mirror the influance perfectly, some times it seams to leave negligible amounts of weiting on one side but not on the other, which is more of an annoyance more then anything...

warby

depending on how lowpoly your mesh is you could copy paste the skinning from the component editor that + having all quads be triangulated the same way would give you the optimal result but is kind of tedious.

a friend of mine wrote me a mel script once that allowed me to select two verts and than transfer the skinning from the first selected to the second selected one thats how i did the skin tight outfits for this hl2deathmatch model: NSFW

NSFW

http://warby.bitproll.de/projects/0031_kitty_hl2/kitty_dress_ingame.jpg

http://warby.bitproll.de/projects/0031_kitty_hl2/kitty_french_maid_ingame.jpg

http://warby.bitproll.de/projects/0031_kitty_hl2/kitty_neko_mimi_ingame.jpg


NSFW

same result but much less work (unfortunately i don't have it anymore i just looked id love to share it with you because i know how pain in the ass it is to do it manually)

rorozilla

Awe!! Its all good! At least i know its not an uncommon issue I'm having here!


I've been playing with the copy Sking weight tool and im starting to see some results, it seams to work perfect on vertexes that are right on top of each other but it starts getting freaky when it gets to parts of the model that aren't meant to be on top of one an other; let me make this a bit clearer.

my head and body are two different meshes. both mesh have connecting vertices that are right on top of each other. If i ask the copy skin weight tool to copy the influence. It will make the connecting vertices weld correctly, but will completely destroy the facial skinning i have made up until now.

Is there a way of Selecting the area needed to be copied and then manually smooth out the kinks my self?

rorozilla

ok, so after further exploration of the maya tools, I think I've figured out a descent pipe-line:

- make a base mesh with no severed pieces (head and body connected for example)
- skin it to your liking. This mesh will become a reference for all the future pieces of cloths you will make.
- then take all the separated pieces and copy the skin weight form reference mesh.
-smooth out places that didn't get copied right.

with this, I can at least guaranty my seams will always look combines!

SuperSparkplug

One option for you might be to attach a Wrap Deformer to the clothing so that it deforms to the body, which bypasses most of the issues you may have with re-skinning the clothes. The biggest issue with this though is that deformers do not transfer very well to other things. Exporting it to another format with the deformer attached could cause issues and if you want to use it in a game, game engines tend to completely ignore all deformers.