Research & Development for 3D & the Web

Painting Skin Weights in Maya 1. Select the Mesh 2. Select the 'Paint Skin Weights' tool to bring up the painting menu which allows you to choose the brush type and configure the painting settings. The weight slide bar/entry box allows you to set how heavily weighted you want the mesh to be affected by the joint's movements. It's an all or nothing type deal, where a value of 1.0 is "I want the mesh to be absolutely affected here" and 0.0 is "I don't want this part of the mesh to be affected". When Read more [...]

Relatively simple, but here goes: Freeze Transformations and Delete History on the Mesh you are skinning Select the Root Joint and then shift-select the mesh you want to attach your joints to. Select the Animation option in the Menu Bar options so that you have the animation menus displayed. Go to Skin > Smooth Bind [] Set the 'Max Influences' option to 2 or 3 only (this is the number of joints which can influence the points on the mesh. Hit Apply. Read more [...]

To get surfaces to deform as you move joints, you must bind them to the skeleton. There are many skinning techniques in Maya to bind a surface. This page will look at a few of them. Parent Binding: Probably the simplest type of binding is just to parent geometry to joints. This doesn't require any tweaking, but does require the pieces of your model to be separate, eg. 2 rectangles which are detached from each other. Some other examples where parenting is appropriate is a ring on a finger or the Read more [...]