Maya - Referenced Characters for Rigging

Yerus

Hi folks,
I'm trying to understand about referencing-in characters before rigging. This is a recommended doing by Advanced Skeleton team but I'm really not sure about it's benifits.
Will referenced characters preserve weight painting should I ever change their topology in the source file?
Does swapping character files/references have some benefit, because I imagine that I would have to repaint the whole thing, right? And if for any reason I wish to reference the original (already weight painted) character, it would've lost it's paintings, isn't it correct?
So, how the heck could be referencing beneficial in that sense?
Thx.

oglu

Export and import the weights or store them on a dummy in the scene.

I would recommend referencing in thr character for rigging only for experienced riggers. It does create a lot of troubles on top. 

Alex_J

It will help to understand referencing in general, without complication of rigging to begin with:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS-xfE9eDfk

I can't say too much about the benefits of referencing in this case, I believe it has more utility in a team environment, but a recommendation is to get the NG skin tools if you don't have them already. Makes the weight painting transfer trivially easy.

throttlekitty

The biggest benefit is in filesize, since the geometry doesn't live in the rig scene. The other being that the source scene can be updated at any time and have those changes visible in the target scene at any point. But the benefit of either depends on your needs and skill (there absolutely will be troubleshooting to be done).

I agree with oglu though, it can be a headache even in simple cases, I know I've had some weird issues with material assignments getting broken repeatedly. But the nice thing is that you can drop the reference back out and the scene is clean in most cases.

And if you're not using ngSkinTools or maya's built in method for saving skin weights, you can always reference in a rigged character or version and copy weights from that. This is a general good practice to do regardless of referencing, backups are good!