Skin weights affected by UVs?

pixeldamage

Is it possible to mess up a Skin modifier's weights simply by setting up UVs on a mesh by putting EditPoly and Unwrap modifiers below it?

My skin seems to have corrupted on a lot of my verts and I didnt do any huge mesh editing. I tried going back to an older file and saving the UVs and reloading them but they wont reload either and reloading skin weight envelopes screws everything even worse! With hindsight I may have connected a couple of edges on the feet and removed two edge loops from the chest but would this screw up so much regarding weights?

Looks like i'll have to redo all my hard skinning work!

renderhjs

the vertex index order is very importing for skinning - once you change it the skin table is not related exactly anymore.
With UV you have the build in preserve UV and change UV as well options in the editMesh and edit Poly objects. Meaning that they are much more harmonizing in max as skin data - because as you edit the mesh , max also changes the UV parallel.

now if I am not wrong any modification you do on top of the skin modifier (e.g edit- poly) should not kill the skinning within 3dsmax - but it might fuck up upon exporting. So the best practice is to rig only if you are done with your model - or use the skinwrap? modifier to project vertex motions from 1 mesh (e.g already skinned) to a another mesh with different topology. But this has nothing to do with the skin modifier and bones so don't use it for export jobs.

rollin

I found while working with edit poly that setting (not creating) new edges and collapsing them can kill the weighting..

Sometime it´s bit like try and error .. what can you do before the weighting screws up

the unwrap modifier shouldn't do your weights any harm, imo

MoP

Unwrap won't mess it up, no, but any sort of mesh editing can potentially mess your skinning around.

Like renderhjs said, only do your skinning once you've finished editing your model.
If you want to edit your model after skinning, you're going to have to do something like duplicate the model, edit the duplicate, then use Skin Wrap to copy the weight data back to your modified mesh.

pixeldamage

Thats great guys... thankyou. Yes ideally I wouldn't do the skinning till the mesh was 100% complete but we're still at early stages and things are constantly being changed. I will definitely have to take a look at the Skin Wrap method for copying vertex weights which MOP and Renderhjs mentioned...