help! lost my Maya skincluster!

John Warner

hey folks. here's the deal.

i've got a character in maya, rigged and animated in a single scene

I accidentally froze my dude and lost the skincluster, so the skeleton is animating but the model is no longer weighted.

fortunately, i do have an old version of the scene, with old animations. Is there a way i can like.. grab the skincluster off the model in the old scene and slap it on the new model?

any other ideas are welcome of course. I could re-weight, but i'd really rather not.

Frump

You can go to the old file and export the skin weights. (should be under edit smooth skin menu)
Then open the file you lost the skinning on and import them. You might be to re-skin first with just a default smooth bind or w/e. I'm not entirely sure. Check the maya documentation for the specifics. It saves the weighting info out as maps and then reapplies it. I've done this before with mixed results, though I think that was back in 8.5 or 2008. With any luck, it might be improved in 2009.

Sorry I don't have time to actually take you through it. Maybe someone else will pick up the slack.

An alternate method would be to export the animation and open it in the older file with the rigged skeleton. I don't know how this is actually achieved, but I know some animators in a project I worked on did a lot of it (without scripts as far as I know). So it is possible.

Hope this solves your problem or at least helps give you a good base to tweak the skinning of.

throttlekitty

I think even exporting the skinned model (possibly skeleton) as a .mb/.ma and imported into your current scene would work too. I know another format I use auto-binds new meshes to existing skeletons where applicable, but I don't know if that's a special feature for that translator.

woogity

just a third idea depending on your model and how well your skin bind went, you could go in your animated file to skeleton>retartgeting> go to neutural pose, import the unskinned model skin it and paint weights again when you move the time slider it should go back to the animation. this should be a helpful step if you decide to import the old weights too, as that import/exporter tends to have some issues.



-Woog

John Warner

hey guys, thanks a lot

Frump -- thanks. I'm giving it a shot, but it's giving me bad results. it's applying the weights.. wellllll.. pretty fucked up actually. I'm going to keep playing with options and see if i can't get it to work right. It might have re-numbered the verticies when i froze the object or something. who knows.

throttlekitty -- I had thought of that, but can't seem to get it to work. it just imports everything with the names changed.. so instead of asking if i want to over-write the new skeleton, it just takes everything and gives it a prefix on the name.. maybe i can turn that off somewhere..

woogity - yeah, i might just have to re-weight the fucker. i really dont want to.. but .. ugh.

MoP

the stupid thing about maya's "save skin weights" stuff is that it writes it to a texture based on UVs ... so if you have mirrored UVs you either end up with totally messed up weights, or you have to make a 2nd UV channel specifically for saving out the skin weights, then copy the UVs onto your "unskinned" mesh before importing skin weights.

it's precisely this reason that I wrote a custom file format that stores exact skin weights per vertex, so i can save out skin weight files and re-import them onto meshes with identical topology.

unfortunately i did this for work so i can't share the script
it's not actually that hard to write though, if you know a little MEL.

throttlekitty

Ohyeah, there are some scripts on highend3d for this, but I've never needed to use one.
And wow, they really changed the site, I think i like it. (creativecrash, eh? when did this happen?)