Mirroring skin weights in Maya with superimposed joints

root

Hey so I'm painting skin weights for eyelid joints, which are superimposed on the eye joints so that the eyelids will slide over the eyes. I painted the skin weights for the eyelids on one side, and when I try to mirror them, the skin weights are mirrored, but they're assigned to the eye joint on the other side, rather than the eyelid joints.

I thought joint mirroring pulls from joint hierachy, but it looks like it's mirroring by location. Is there a way to configure mirroring so that it does what I want?

jfeez

You can label the joints and switch the mirror skin settings to work off joint label first. Here's the help file for it joint labels http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-7F9A9EC5-A67A-4493-B11B-703202FFEF97-htm.html

In my experience it doesn't always work, so you can use the move joint tool to move the eyelid joints slightly, then mirror the weights and move the joints back to the right place

Denny

I have noticed that Maya have a tendency to sometimes not include the selected joints on bind and they have to be added again. If the joint is not properly included, the copy weights will land on the next one. So double check that all joints are included first.

I even wrote my own script for binding meshes to get past that annoyance.