Maya Skinning: do game engines support smooth bind?

ArchangelZero

Hey sorry for the newbness of the question but:

I was trained on max, and max has one skinning method to rule them. Have to use Maya on this project. I'm confused when I see Maya smooth and rigid bind. The docs say smooth is for CG and rigid is for games, but, really? Can they be THAT different that a game engine simply cannot handle smooth bind?

Looking for more of a comparative evaluation of the pros/cons of using smooth vs rigid, if that's not too much to ask for... (that is assuming the answer isn't just a flat "no, engines don't take smooth bind." lol.)

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

kodde

Games do support multiple skin weights (smooth skin). I have no idea of how many for different engines. I know that UT2k4 allowed up to 3 weights per vertex :P

throttlekitty

Most games do both, nearly every character you see in a game is what Maya would call smooth binding. Rigid binding is more like parenting to a node or bone; the entire affected shape would move/rotate with a bone. That said, I haven't messed around with rigid binding much.

Snowfly

I wouldn't take Maya's docs as the end-all truth about what kind of binding a game engine supports. Under the hood it's all just bone weights assigned to verts. Question is, since you're being asked to use Maya on this project, why post a pipeline question on the internet when you could just ask your co-devs what the recommended way to get bone weights into the engine is?

Malus

We never touched Rigid Bind in Maya.
Smooth bind is all we ever used and we had 4 bone weighting per vertex in game.