T-Shinzon
11-24-2007, 02:26 AM
I'm having problems with 8.5's paint skin weights tool (which you probably surmised from the title of this thread). What I've got is a skeletal mesh that has a lot of joints that are very close to each other in the center of the grid. It's important that these joints are all very very close to each other, as the mesh components that are connected to them are all bits that need to revolve around the center, and now I'm painting the influences (or more accurately flood-filling the influences) using smooth skin bind as was the standard for UT2k4 models.
The problem is, Maya 8.5 has been optimized so that when you select a mesh component, the paint skin weights tool settings show a bunch of joints that are close to or influencing the mesh component in question. This would normally speed up workflow (you don't have to dig through so many joints to find the one you want), but the one I want isn't showing up at all because it's too far from the mesh component. Normally this wouldn't be a problem because I could right-mouse-click the joint in the perspective viewport and thus add it to the list, but since there are some 20 or so of these joints within 0.01 gridspace of each other, that becomes a rather difficult prospect.
So the question is, is there a way to have the Paint Skin Weights tool show all the joints that can influence the mesh? Or is there a way to edit the mesh's influences by selecting joints in the Outliner instead of the Paint Skin Weights tool? Or do I have to suck up and reduce joint size to tiny values and zoom in all the way and use the RMB feature (in which case...how do I change the size of joints (and dont tell me Scale X, Y, and Z) :| )
EDIT: The RMB thing doesn't work. It only lets you select stuff that's already in the Paint Skin Weights list of joints.
EDIT 2: Nevermind, figured it out. Used the Add Influence tool under Skin-->Edit Smooth Skin-->Add Influence, had to select (in the Outliner) mesh components to add joint to and the joint in question. Works beautifully.
The problem is, Maya 8.5 has been optimized so that when you select a mesh component, the paint skin weights tool settings show a bunch of joints that are close to or influencing the mesh component in question. This would normally speed up workflow (you don't have to dig through so many joints to find the one you want), but the one I want isn't showing up at all because it's too far from the mesh component. Normally this wouldn't be a problem because I could right-mouse-click the joint in the perspective viewport and thus add it to the list, but since there are some 20 or so of these joints within 0.01 gridspace of each other, that becomes a rather difficult prospect.
So the question is, is there a way to have the Paint Skin Weights tool show all the joints that can influence the mesh? Or is there a way to edit the mesh's influences by selecting joints in the Outliner instead of the Paint Skin Weights tool? Or do I have to suck up and reduce joint size to tiny values and zoom in all the way and use the RMB feature (in which case...how do I change the size of joints (and dont tell me Scale X, Y, and Z) :| )
EDIT: The RMB thing doesn't work. It only lets you select stuff that's already in the Paint Skin Weights list of joints.
EDIT 2: Nevermind, figured it out. Used the Add Influence tool under Skin-->Edit Smooth Skin-->Add Influence, had to select (in the Outliner) mesh components to add joint to and the joint in question. Works beautifully.