Skin Weight Local Vertex Position Save/Load Plugin

oXYnary

I have now had to restart skinning for the third time. Its getting frustrating. Saving envelopes doesn't help, and Skin or Die doesn't seem to work. Maybe in part because of Multires, but also with earlier revisions of weighting without Multires, it errors out on loading saying epoly vertex out of range.

I need a plug in that saves the vertex weights not by id, but by position locally (since the model was replaced on the scene).

Looked through the Max script thread without luck other than Skin or Die.

To make clearer.
Start A: Realized forgot to recenter axis, and needed to move to center of viewport in the positive Z axis for engine. Lost days of work.
Start B: Realized somehow along the way ended up using the slice polygon tool which added a ton of extra polys. After correcting this had to reset the Multi-res tool (which when generated renumbers the vertices).
Current Restart...

Help?

gavku

hhhmm... if you think you have to re skin, I would just extract the skin data, at least then when you redo it you already have a head start on it.

Husch

If you use Max 8 or Max 9 you can use the skin utilities.
It will save the skin data to a new mesh, which is the same as saving the weight of the vertices by position.

oXYnary

Thanks Husch, that was what I was looking for.

Gavku, how do I extract the skin data? I only see options to save the envelope weighting.

gavku

Go to your utilities menu...SkinUtilities.....I would write a little step-by-step, but just had eye surgery and am not enjoying looking at a monitor at the mo..
its pretty straight forward anyway.

silversteez

the skinWrap modifier in max 9 also kicks ass for transfering weights by vert position (not sure if this is similar to skinUtilities, don't have max in front of me at the moment). i've used it a few times at work with the default settings and it's worked perfectly.

Rick Stirling

BAKE the weights before you save. That's what you are missing.

Saving the .env file within the Skin modifier only saves the size and position of the envelopes. If you hit the little bake icon (looks like an oven) with all verts selected, you can then reload them.

When you load them again, remember to hit the Match by Name button on the dialogue box.