There have been a couple of attempts to establish alternatives to weight
painting, but none of them prevailed.
Before there was weight painting in Maya there was "rigid skinning" with
special deformers to
enhance the shaping of the mesh in areas around the joints.
Mark Snowswell suggested an alternative approach as part of the ACT
(Advanced Character Techology) toolset for Max back then, which was
basically a by-product of his reseach into muscle-based deformation.
I believe it offered automatic volume preservation, but I dont't remember
what the actual approach was.
Yomehow the sking weights were figured out automagically for a given joint
hierarchy.
Then of course there is volume-based assignment of vertices to bones,
which used to be the only method in Max using the Physique modifier, which
allowed to define bubble shapes around the bones to set skin-weights for
vertices inside those bubbles. The Skin modifier that was later introduced
allowed a similar, but less flexible apporach (bubbles could only be
shaped using different radii along the length). I believe Massive allows
volume-based skin weights definition too if you import assets that have no
envelopes assigned yet.
The problem I see with automatic or semi-automatic assignment is that more
often than not you need minute control over distinct vertices at some
point in production, and so far the only method giving you that is by
using per-vertex based deformers and assignment tools. That doesn't mean
there is no room for improvement or innovation - for me dual quaternion
skinning came out of nowhere too just when I thought the usual skinning
approach was cool.
Life would so much easier if we had a gold set of standards for
procedures and outputs ;)
I must admit I never really liked the painting weights idea. I
understand how it works but Its always worried me that its seems a much
more complex system then should be required. I have always wondered if
you could get the mesh to work better off something simpler like volume
deformers on the bone and the joints. Tie that in with not allowing the
volume deformers to penetrate each other and you would be a long way
there.
We have seen some amazing advances in Rendering of late. Arnold and
Redshift spring to mind. Its about time enveloping / painting weights
has a total rethink. Its a more then a decade old solution to a problem
that was never effectively solved in the first place.
From: Raffaele Fragapane
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Reply-To:
"[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>"
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Monday 15 April 2013 9:41 AM
To:
"[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>"
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Subject: Re: Modo's Deformation (Weight Containers)
It's one of those things that must have sounded great in theory (I
remember Alias reps telling us how we would have never have had to worry
about topology again, all we needed was one half arsed UV map and we'd
do our weights only once in our life, ever).
It's a shame it ended up being absolute crap :p
The painting tools though do reflect that a lot, but yeah, it's not
entirely correct to assimilate the two.
I'm surprised AD hasn't standardized a plugin by buying it yet. I mean
seriously, what is 2014, Maya 13? 14? And still no two people agree on
how to save per vertex data.
Anyway...
On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 5:37 PM, Stefan Kubicek
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I think you are confusing this with the skin weights import and export
tools that ship with Maya, which are indeed crap. Hence the array of
third party scripts in this area. Weight painting is, admittedly, not
less solid than what Softimage has to offer in this regard though.
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