uv problem

MikeF

so I'm working out some uv's for one of my characters that is already animated, but I'm running into so problems...
Whenever i play the animation back, the uv's distort horribly.
Frame 0 (T pose frame where i unwrapped the character) is the only part of the entire animation where the uv's are legible.
Using maya 8.5

Snowfly

Generally you don't want to unwrap after binding in Maya...better do it before. Have you tried deleting all non-deformer history? Or transfering the UV's from a copy of the t-posed mesh to the weighted one?

Illusions

UV'ing after you've rigged and animated your character is a bad thing. The UV unwrap channel is being evaluated after your rigging and skinning (which means that when everything is evaluated, the UV projection is going to take into account the current position of the character, not the T pose position). I don't know if there's any other solution to this, but you're probably going to have to unbind your character from the rig, at a frame where the UVs look right, delete history on your character, and then rebind him.

Snowfly

Here's a script I've used reliably in the past, don't know if it still work with current versions of Maya but it's worth a shot.

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/animation/324.html

MikeF

Thanks for the help guys
yeah, i thought unwrapping after rigging and animating would cause issues, but our 3d instructor set deadlines in reverse aparently.
Deleting the non deformer history seemed to work, but for future reference, this script seems very usefull. I'm just not sure if its functional with 8.5, i'm not to savy on how to even use scripts properly, but i loaded it into the mel command box, draged it to my shelf but nothing happens when you try to use it, did i do something wrong there?

rooster

if I've had to make changes, I usually unbind the skin, make the changes, rebind the skeleton, import the old model and copy skin weights, then delete out the imported mesh. Copy skin weights seems to do a decent job if the mesh is exactly the same shape

Snowfly

k glad the problem's solved. the script was written before delete non-deformer history became a feature of maya, and i think does exactly the same thing. maybe no point in having both. but to use it, just select the mesh with extra history and hit your shelf button, should do the trick.

anyway in my opinion, doing the unwrap after you've done the weighting is the right way to go about it, since by then you've worked out the kinks in your mesh's deformations . it's too bad maya makes this workflow kinda tricky though!

MikeF

argh, thought it worked. Now i'm seeing a few stray vertex out of position. I've tried re-importing my weights, but it either does nothing or just gives be a garbled result

Snowfly

then maybe it's no longer compatible with maya! are you running the script on your mesh's t-pose?

MikeF

this is just using the delete non-deformer history and maya's built in import/export weight maps