paint bone weights in maya driving me insane

marshmonkey

In Maya 8.0 I will be attempting to paint weights on a soft skinned model and every time I paint something, then go to a different joint and come back, my painted weights will be different. This is driving me up the wall, any solutions?

Illusions

I'm wondering this as well. Even if I select "Hold Weights" it'll change them over. In fact, I've had even weirder issues where I'll weight some vertices 100% to one joint, and 0% for all others, then find that it changed the weighting for all vertices on all joints throughout the hierarchy.

marshmonkey

yes, same thing here. I will flood all joints with 0 influence and it will just be different when I go back through them.

Jesse Moody

hmmm i've run into these problems before as well and i'm tryiing to think of what i was doing wrong that fixed it. Let me get into maya and poke around and see what I can come up with for you guys if someone here doesn't beat me to it.

Penzer

Funny this thread should come up today, I'm trying to rig characters for my demo reel right now and I had a huge battle with the weighting.

CheeseOnToast

A lot of the problems with skinning in Maya come about because the default smooth bind settings are seemingly designed to screw you over. Try redoing the smooth bind from scratch, making sure to untick "maintain max influences", and "remove unused influences". Jumpng weights have always been a problem in Maya though, even when supposedly locked.

marshmonkey

hmm, I unticked those options but still no change in the behavior, I will try monkeying around with more of the bind settings.

Whargoul

Are you using the base Maya 8.0 (no patches)? I know there are some issues with the weighting in the first 8.0 release. If you have a <ahem> real license, you can get the patch releases off their website. The patch release is a full install, not a patch file. I think we're using p14 at work.

And yes, always uncheck the defaults in the smooth bind. Maintain max influences can fuck you over with redistributing your weights.

marshmonkey

Ok, I found something that I was doing wrong I think. I didn't have enough joints to share the weighting. By adding an extra dummy joint, I was able to push all the ones I wanted to rig to 0, which put the dummy joint to full white and allowed me to paint in the joints that I wanted without it shifting around on me trying to even it out. The way I was trying to rig it there was no joint for the rest of the verts I didn't care about to be rigged to.

Vailias

Another way to do it is to select the verts you are having issues with the weights jumping on, then open the component editor.

(window->general editors->component editor)
then select the Smooth Skins tab. It will list all the influences with a rating higher than one, and often the zero ones too. Find the bone name you want to bind them to, or the one you are having trouble with, and type in the influence to either 1 or zero, respectively.

Also I find that painting with the brush set to ADD rather than Replace seems to work fairly consistently at overwriting old bone weights. Oh and be VERY carefull with smooth, if you don't already know.

CheeseOnToast

One more thing, if you switch from multi-coloured bone weights to greyscale from time to time, it's much easier to spot rogue weights. I usually use the component editor to block in the weights roughly, then fine-tune with painting. Painting right from the start always causes headaches.

Shawner

It's also a good idea to prune out 0 weighted influences. Even if you flood, they are still part of the influence list until they are pruned. If they arn't removed they will recieve weighting when you smooth and fak you over.