[Maya] Rigging problem, going insane trying to fix it

Turbopasta

I've been trying to solve something for about 3 days now and I have absolutely no idea what to do at this point. I'm basically stuck until I can get past this part. 

I have a problem with a bipidal rig where weird stuff happens if I try to mirror joints from one side to the other. I'm happy with the weights and the joints on one side, but when I bring it over to the other the IK joint on the knee locks up and the knee doesn't bend at all. This might just be a simple problem, and if you have a way to fix this easily, I'm all ears.

Anyways, I'm assuming that I need to do something like unbind the skin keeping the skin weight history, fix/add/remove some joints, and then rebind the skin with the same weight history I just had, right? Well, here's what happens if I try to do that.



My actual rig has control curves, eyes, and other stuff, I'm just using this simple one to troubleshoot. 





I'm showing the bind skin options, but I'm not sure it matters if I unbinded skin with the history on it. Even if I deleted the history, I wouldn't get a result as crazy as incoming image.



I'm getting MEL errors which read:

// Error: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2017/scripts/others/createSkinCluster.mel line 515: No object matches name:  // 

// Error: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2017/scripts/others/createSkinCluster.mel line 515: Object '' not found. // 



If anyone could help me understand what's going on and how to fix this I would greatly appreciate it, thanks. 

Mark Dygert

Did you delete history and freeze transforms on the mesh before binding it? If not, you should. 

Also that seems like a lot of joints for the hands and feet...

Turbopasta

Okay, I've mostly fixed the problem now. The reason I was getting that gross deformation was because when I went to copy the weights back onto it, Maya turned off weight normalization, so I had to switch it to Post in the Normalize Weights section on the channel box. Simple solution. Once I deleted the old joints and re-mirrored the joints for the right knee and down, the knee started to bend normally again. 

Scruples

Honestly the weight painting tools for Maya are garbage, I was amazed to come back to it after 10 years and see they haven't improved at all.

Sorry I just had to get that rant out.

Mark Dygert

@Turbopasta I'm glad you got it fixed!

@Scruples Yea. Add to it adjusting the weights on a per vert basis. ngskintools helps a bit with layers and ACTUAL smoothing that doesn't always spike out, but still the weight painting in Maya, sucks. Why is the "fix skin weights" (hammer) not a brush based tool? WHHY is it still based on selection? Thankfully the Geodesic voxel skinning gives a better starting place but still, I want to gouge my eyes out sometimes, not because it's buggy (it is that too) but because the workflow is so slow and cumbersome.