maya: wrapdeform to skin?

thomasp

i'm having lot's of fun here with 3ds max's neat ability to convert wrapdeforms into regular skin. now i'm working on this project that's mainly maya-based and want to know if there's a solution out there that let's me do the same thing in maya - convert the skinning of a wrapdeformer-driven mesh into a regular skincluster or what it's called so that i can delete the original deformer and export without quirks into a game engine.

searching on highend3d didn't give me any clues as to any skinning transfer scripts that might be able to do that. anyone?

Whargoul

Do you have a wrap deformer weighted to bones, that deforms a mesh? If so, I have a script I wrote that should work: it's for converting lattice deformers to the bones, it's basically the same thing.

thomasp

yes, that's the case - would love to check your script out if you are able to give it away.

Whargoul

Here's it is. To use it just select the mesh you want the weights transferred onto and type CRbakeWeights in the command line. The bones that you want transferred over MUST already be bound to the mesh, but they can have zero weight. The simlpest thing is to create a single extra dummy bone, select that and your entire skeleton, and bind it to your mesh. Weight your entire mesh to the dummy bone. Now run the script and it should transfer the weights from the wrap to the mesh, as best as it can. It's usally pretty damn close results (as best as mathematically possible - sometimes is not possible with some deformers to exactly match the exact deformation).

http://members.shaw.ca/whargoul/CRbakeWeights.mel

I just ripped it out of my main weighting tools script, so I hope it works, I didn't test it It's a pretty cool trick, the way the script works

Whargoul

Hmm.. maybe I changed it sometime in the past, because you don't need to bind those bones ot the mesh anymore I'd wanted to fix that, and I guess I did at some time!

Select mesh.
Run CRbakeWeights.
Done!

It should find out the bones it needs and bind them in for you.

thomasp

many thanks, i'll report back how it worked for me early next week when i'm back at the workplace.

thomasp

i had a chance to play with it now. selecting the wrapped mesh and running the script did the trick. great stuff, thanks!