I solved the problem for our pipeline by writing a tool which is similar to GATOR but runs as a command instead of an operator. The advantage is the tool can operate on selected subcomponents instead of the entire mesh. A further embellishment I exposed was different methods for searching the source mesh for envelope weights. The user was free to move between built-in methods such as closest location, raycast, closest vertex, ... as well as other custom criteria I devised myself.
I also wrote a dedicated clothing transfer tool which allows weights to be painted on our main character, then transferred and refit onto the other characters while accounting for changes in proportions of limbs and torso, for example. It's a very solvable problem if you crack open the script editor. Matt From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Siew Yi Liang Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 10:29 AM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Re: Paint weights across multiple envelopes? And symmetry mapping errors.... The problem is...my mesh is already split up into pieces when i was starting to weight them. The full body mesh doesn't exist anymore, the hidden faces are already gone. :X Also I tried duplicating all the geometry and merging it together while trying to preserve the existing weighting so I could continue working on it and then GATOR the weights back to the seperated geo later, but merging the geo together even while transferring all attributes seemed to remove the weighting from the character entirely... I'm wondering if I should just bite the bullet and paint the weights manually at this point via numerical input. It's a pain, but right now I don't know of any other method that wouldn't be overly troublesome, short of modeling the hidden polys again and combining them back into the body mesh. The lack of ability to mirror weights on the head is going to be a real pain to get the rig to behave symmetrically though. Hopefully the paint tools get an update eventually for this sort of thing...I never even knew painting across multiple meshes was an issue, no wonder it's recommend to model unibody in XSI. Oh well, something new every day! :P Thanks for the advice all! Yours sincerely, Siew Yi Liang On 2/17/2014 3:14 AM, Greg Maguire wrote: This is my preferred method too. ILM had a really cool concept I'd like to see in Soft. Instead of painting with the radius of a circle, make the brush three dimensional like a ball. Wings can be tricky, I generally chop the top or bottom part of a wing off and Gator everything. However a 3D ball would remove that need. On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:08 AM, Mirko Jankovic <mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com<mailto:mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com>> wrote: You dont even have to merge them, gator will manage just fine for example: paint weigh on full body mesh duplicate body mesh and delete all non seen polys, you dont need them, but you can jstu skip this and just keep full body mesh if you dont mind having not seen polygons, maybe even better if cloth materials have sometranslucency then GATOR shirt, pants.. any other cloth or prop object. It iwill follow full body mehsh just fine Tweak here or there if needed but in mosta case it works pretty fine On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Peter Agg <peter....@googlemail.com<mailto:peter....@googlemail.com>> wrote: Yep, I do as Mirko does for this stuff, the envelope tools are fairly limited for a lot of this fiddly kind of things. If you're merging existing geo together make sure everything is welded - Polygon Islands are a pain to deal with as well. Ideally you want some kind of single mesh body-glove for the 'master' envelope. On 17 February 2014 10:34, Mirko Jankovic <mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com<mailto:mirkoj.anima...@gmail.com>> wrote: Not sure how others deal with it but when having character that will have cltoth weighted and simulated I like to have an mesh with full body, and then 2nd mesh with only visible parts, hands, neck, head etc... Then painting weights on full body mesh only, GATOR-ing everything else and then for animationa nd everything els using only cloth and partialy bodu mesh, and full body mesh is left out of model not used for anything esle but for painting and GATOR-ing weights to all other meshes on characters. On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:30 AM, Siew Yi Liang <soni...@gmail.com<mailto:soni...@gmail.com>> wrote: Hi all, sorry for another silly question, but I've just spent the better part of 3 hours trying to find a solution: is there actually a way in XSI to paint across multiple envelopes at the same time, assuming they have the same deformer influences? I've been searching around for a way to do so but it doesn't seem like I can, and the best I can hope for is to GATOR over the points I want? The problem is that I have a character split up into several parts, so weighting the areas where neck meets shirt, torso meets pants etc. is a little annoying when I can't paint across them seamlessly. I've actually never had to deal with this before in XSI, so I have no idea if this is actually possible? Additionally, when trying to create a symmetry mapping template for a certain geometry, I'm getting: Application.CreateSymmetryMappingTemplate("", "", "", "") # ERROR : 2057-GetSkeleton - Input object is not a skeleton object - [line 492 in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2013 SP1\Application\DSScripts\enveloping.vbs] The deformers affecting it are just implicit bones, so I'm not sure what exactly the error is referring to - I tried manually creating the symmetry template myself and mirroring the weights, but nothing happened. No error message appeared, but the weights didn't mirror either. The scene file is available at: http://1drv.ms/1cfWE34 , I'd really appreciate it if anyone has run into this situation before and could spare a few minutes to take a quick look! The head geometry is the one giving problems (I thought it might have had something to do with the ICE facial rig, but I froze those operators and tried doing the symmetry template again and it still gave the same issue...) -- Yours sincerely, Siew Yi Liang -- Greg Maguire | Inlifesize Mobile: +44 7512 361462 | Phone: +44 2890 204739 g...@inlifesize.com<mailto:g...@inlifesize.com> | www.inlifesize.com<http://www.inlifesize.com>
