Painting Skin Weights on Armored Character Confusion

wilarts

Hi all, I'm trying to skin my character but it has armor. When I rotate the atlas bone of the head the geometry warps unnaturally. I've locked all other joints and set the atlas bone-joint to max influence while the secondary joints in the neck have no influence on the head. Any help is welcome. 

wilarts

Never mind my green self didn't clear all the other influences from the rest of the joints.

Alex_J

here's a tip: get ngSkintools from the autodesk store. Makes painting much easier.

Second, you don't need to remove influences. You only need to give 100% to the head joint. It works by percentages, if head has 100% there is nothing left for any others. Problem with maya default tools is that if you use the smooth brush it can assign random weights from weird places.

If using mayas default skinning tools, only work additively. This tut shows good practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cBlRF_dr90&t=2500s

wilarts

Ahh thanks for the info!

monster

@wilarts
For rigid / armor pieces it's faster to use the component editor to assign 100% to the selected vertices. Don't bother painting unless you're working on hips, shoulders, or the face.

wilarts

@monster
Are there any don't does or beginner pitfalls to the component editor method? Like when binding skin never have history on your geometry? I appreciate this insight because I couldn't find good tutorials on armored characters. 

monster

It’s the exact same setup and workflow. Just set the component editor to selected vertices.

And if you see anything funny use the Normalize Weights tool.

oglu

Here some good tip from Kiel. 
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/628888617