Copy Skin Weights and "Must select a source and a destination skin"

Paper Scarecrow

Hello Polycounters, newbie here.

Whenever in Maya (2015) I try to copy skin weights (from body mesh to clothes) I get "Error: line 0: Must select a source and a destination skin, or components on a source and destination skin.", I get it regardless of what I have selected or whether the selected parts are skinned or not. I've made sure to smooth bind the cloth to the skeleton and that I select first the body mesh then the cloth mesh before clicking the copy button, to no avail. I've scoured the internet for info, tried things like deleting history before binding and guesswork like that, etc. so I'm at a loss.

Here is a test scene, it's not much but I can't do something as simple as that, selecting the correctly skinned Mesh_A, shift+clicking the incorrectly skinned Mesh_B and clicking the Copy Skin Weights option gets me that error.

For the project I'm currently working it's not a life-or-death thing, but I really would like to be able to copy weights. Thanks in advance.

Paper Scarecrow

I think that's the most troubleshooting I've done for a single problem. Anyhows, I solved it, so I guess I'll post for other hapless souls like me. I believe the problem was caused because duplicating faces from the body mesh caused its vertices to lose their smooth skin components (per the Component Editor) and thus Copy Skin Weights wouldn't recognize it as skinned even though by all means it was. I knew it was going to be something silly like that.

I didn't know a workaround to that so I had to reskin the mesh, then Copy Weight Tools worked as expected. Next time make clothes from a duplicated body mesh or something.

monster

I think Delete Non Deformer History would help in these situations. Not sure if you can try that on the problem file. I don't have Maya installed currently so I can't test.