Separating skinned mesh into parts for FBX export in MAYA

pukeanddie

I have this rigged Giraffe in Maya. It's all weighted and ready to use, but I need to split it into pieces since the destination platform (Facebook AR Studio) does not support skinned meshes with > 20 bones. So I've attempted to split the mesh up along the neck, legs and tail - separating out each mesh component into it's own file and eliminating unnecessary bones.  I've been doing this by selecting the faces, doing an editMesh -> detach and then mesh -> separate. In some cases after this operation I end up with extra parts and so then I recombine those with mesh > combine.

My goal is to export each skinned mesh component as an FBX without loosing my skin weights.

The main issue I've been running into is that unless I delete history on the mesh I am unable to export a useable FBX File.



But when I try to delete non-deformer history I get  the following error:
 // Error: line 1: The -prePostDeformers flag is not supported with the following node(s) in the history: polyUnite1 polySeparate1 ...

Another thing I've tried is to export the skin weights; unbind the skin; delete all history on mesh;  then re-attach skin and copy weights but this doesn't work for me because when I try to unbind the skin I get an error: Failed to export the attribute map. 

Of course if I unbind skin, delete history, and rebind skin the FBX export works fine. But then I loose all of my skin weights.

Mark Dygert

Copy your mesh, delete history, freeze transforms, rebind, COPY skin weights from your old mesh, delete the old mesh and see how that goes. 

pukeanddie

Thank you, but I am stuck on this approach too. I have copied the mesh, deleted history on the duplicate mesh and rebound it  to the same skeleton. But when copying skin weights from original mesh to the duplicated mesh It gives me an error 'Must select a source and a destination skin, or components on a source and destination skin.'  I can see that it is skipping 'headShape' since it is not a skinned object.