Maya: Rigging skin problems

DataDragon

Hi, I am rigging my first character. I have just implemented the joints, now I am looking to make the skin deform properly. However, I have come into a bit of trouble, after using Smooth bind, the shoulder does not deform well (images below).

Any help will be appreciated.

Bartalon

Automatic binding can only do so much, and it is very dependent on the topology of the mesh. You will need to go in and manually paint skin weights for your joints to make sure all the vertices deform the way you want them to.

Animation workspace > Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Paint Skin Weights Tool (make sure you are in object mode when using this tool)

DataDragon

Bartalon wrote: »

Automatic binding can only do so much, and it is very dependent on the topology of the mesh. You will need to go in and manually paint skin weights for your joints to make sure all the vertices deform the way you want them to.

Animation workspace > Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Paint Skin Weights Tool (make sure you are in object mode when using this tool)

Hey, really, thanks for the advice, very concise and helpful.

Unfortunately, I ran into an error, for whatever reason, when I move the arm or leg, the geometry around the arm (Latissimus dorsi) moves! (images below)

slipsius

Skin weight painting is tricky, and definitely not something anyone will be able to explain to you well enough through text. I strongly suggest checking out some video tutorials on the subject matter. It can be very tedious, and one of the reasons riggers are few and far between.

heres a vid to get you started. [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IO6ixLT47A[/ame]

Bartalon

DataDragon wrote: »

Hey, really, thanks for the advice, very concise and helpful.

Unfortunately, I ran into an error, for whatever reason, when I move the arm or leg, the geometry around the arm (Latissimus dorsi) moves! (images below)

There are a couple things that could be happening here.

First, the vertices in that area are simply assigned to the wrong joint. You would want the verts that make up the torso to be weighted to (influenced by) the spine joints. If the verts are weighted to the arm joint--which is a common occurrence with automatic smooth binding--they will instead move when the arm moves. It's your job to go in and manually adjust which vertices are influenced by which joints.

Second, what you could be seeing is the vertices of that region are sharing skin weights between multiple joints. For instance, imagine a vertex has 50% influence from a spine joint, and 50% influence from an arm joint. When you rotate the arm joint, it will pull that vertex, but the spine joint is stationary, and will try to keep that vertex in place. The resulting deformation is like a tug of war between joint influences.

Either way, definitely check out some skin weight painting videos, such as the one slipsius has posted.

DataDragon

Thanks for all the help, it feels like I learned a lot today already guys. It turns out, all of those areas that were moving while I moved other joints, were vertices that were not painted to 100% influence of a joint or joints. I think it had to do with my smooth bind settings, 1 max joint influence.

CharacterCarl

Don't know if it's mentioned in the video, but ideally you should look all your weights but the two you want to modify when lowering values on one of your influences. Otherwise Maya will distribute/scatter the weights across all your other influences.