Setting bone weights in Maya for a robot

Kawe

So usually if I'd rig a robot I'd parent the different parts (as mesh objects) to the bones. But for my school project we are using our own engine and supposedly it doesn't support having multiple meshes like that. The solution I guess is to skin the mesh to the bones but that'll cause a lot of trouble since there are many parts who shouldn't be weighted to specific bones.

My question is now if there's any easy way to select a whole part and setting weights to 1 or 0 in Maya... I believe my school has 2008 or 2009.

By part I mean a series of polygons that are connected but not connected to anything else.

I guess doing it vertice by vertice isn't too bad with a rigid bind but if there's an easier way I'd like to hear it

Spinks

select a vert, grow selection til you have the whole part and then use the component editor to set the weights.

Kawe

oooh right. grow selection. silly me, didn't think maya had it

thanks.

MoP

Or just use the "Flood" button in Paint Skin Weights, with mode set to Replace and the value set to 1.
Then you can just select 1 vert, convert to shell (CTRL + right-click, choose To Shell to get the whole element - way faster than grow selection), and hit Flood with the required joint selected. Basically doing the same as what Spinks said, but IMHO is faster and less fiddly.