Maya weight painting issue- Vertices getting pulled towards ground

Ozz14

Hey everyone, I'm weight painting my character and its been a lot more work than I anticipated. Mainly because I keep getting this bug. When I remove influence from the skin with certain joints, the vertices transform up or down dramatically. Right now I'm trying to remove the influence of the jaw joint on the upper lip and when I get the skin black and rid of influence it does this.Any ideas? I've searched through the other chains and the master and hip joints, and they don't appear to be exerting any influence. Could it be something other than a rogue joint?

throttlekitty

You can select the verts and do Windows>General Editors>Component Editor and see all influences in numeric form.

I'd suggest setting the Normalize Weights mode to Interactive. Skin weights always need to add up to 1.0 for proper deformation. This mode (should) intelligently add the weights that you're removing from one joint to another, usually the next nearest joint with the most influence. Any verts having zero influence from a bone will shoot to the scene center.

Ozz14

Worked! Thanks for all the help so far throttlekitty. If you don't mind I have another related problem. When I try to rotate the base joint of a finger forward on the x axis, the vertices are deformed dramatically in that direction. I'm not sure whats causes this and it persists even after changing the normalization mode.

Ozz14

If I rotate from the base of the shoulder on the x axis

throttlekitty

it's haunted.


Since you did work with Post turned on, there's a good chance that many of your verts have weights totalling less than 1. Do Skin>Normalize Weights to fix that first, then go back through each joint to make sure the weighting is good and start painting out bad deformation.

edit: Sorry, I didn't even think to mention the normalization last night. I used to be socially functional, now I use Autodesk Maya!

Ozz14

Yep. Ended up just redoing the whole skinning process w/ interactive, turning down the max number of influences and unchecking all the extraneous stuff. After reading up on what the settings do it seems like Maya's default skinning settings are made for a tenured Pixar animator or something lol. My poor character never stood a chance. gracias for the help in finding where I was going wrong though