Does nothing else have this functionality? it seems like such a no brainner...
Maya does. When you are in weight painting mode, just hover your mouse cursor over a bone
that is a valid deformer to the envelope you are working on, right-click and choose
"Select Influence" from the radial menu.
Given that I see all the frustration in Maya users curing and swearing all day
at work next to me as they use their tool of choice (well more often than not
it's someone elses tool chosen for them) I usually side with the Maya basher's,
but weight-painting is one of its rare things that I actually find pleasant to
use.
As long as you keep the Normalize Skin Weights option set to "interactive" and
limit the number of skin weights per vertex to a reasonable level (I hardly ever allow
more than 4) I find myself getting good results very quickly. Weight mirroring but works
well enough,
and I next to never waste time selecting joints in the list of the weight
painting tool. Similarly, I next to never lock any weights, except on really
hard and obsure to paint areas (oral cavity, fingers).
Just like in Max or Softimage, the default skin weight distribution right after
skin binding can have stray skin weights from far away joints.
These can be hard to find. What I normally do is I assign all vertices to the
highest possible deforming joint in the hierarchy (usually the pelvis, if any),
then I go down the hierarchy and paint in the weights joint after joint. Within
a day, I usually have good results, depending on resolution of the mesh and
whether the face neede to be weighted too.
The only probelm I ever had with this tool was that it sometimes caused stray
weights after undoing a paint operation, but it seems this has been fixed some
releases ago, at least it never happened the last couple of years.
On 25 January 2016 at 07:03, Martin Yara <[email protected]> wrote:
For v2014 and later I'd recommend Skin Wrangler, a pyQT+python tool that is pretty
good for that kind of workflow. And for 2013 and previous >>versions without
pyQT support, Max Skin Weight Tool, a mel script based on Max workflow.
In games, at least here and other places I've worked, we rarely use paint weights
because it is more common to have mistakes and uneven >>weights.
Maya's Weight Hammer is the equivalent to Softimage's smooth weights, but way inferior and
without any option at all. I rarely use it because it >>tends to mess up my weights
smoothing it too much and using influences I don't want to. SI's smooth weights could work
very nice selecting >>all points (ex: the whole snake model), while Maya's Hammer do
some decent job only if you select the points where the joints intersect.
If someone at Autodesk is reading, is it possible to have Softimage Smooth
Weights to be ported to Maya?
ngSkinTools smooth was nice, but I didn't get used to it's workflow. I may give
it another try when I need to paint weights.
I found another tool called as_SmoothNearest that looked good in the video demo, but it
ended up being a combination of the Maya's default >>Weight Hammer command and grow
selection. And without using the normalizing option with a potentially risk to have 1+
total weights per >>point. I fixed that code but, still not quite what I wanted.
I ended up writing a custom tool to use smooth paint for selected weights and lock
all the other joints so it would only smooth based on the >>selected points
deformers. Now with that, SkinWrangler and Maya's Heat Map, my weighting workflow is
a little less painful.
Martin
On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 11:28 PM, Sebastien Sterling
<[email protected]> wrote:
I remember skinning in max, not the best but definitely not the worst, it didn't have any pretences let's
say, you HAD to use vertex weight >>>selection assignments or "Weight Tool" (envelops
are garbage), and they had a very practical little menu for that, with options for assigning >>>a
few default pre-sets, 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, as well as the ability to copy/past values.
selection assignment is the slowest method, not great for fast turn around, but
it is also the most precise method.
Softimage kind of had something similar, plus a really good smoothing algorithm, (is it
just me or was soft's smooth weight function, the >>>bomb ?!)
Is there anything like this for maya currently, like max's weight tool i mean ? and the first
words better not be "In Bonus tools ... !" so help me >>>god !
On 24 January 2016 at 13:50, Graham Bell <[email protected]> wrote:
Man I feel you guys’ pain.
I haven’t rigged in Maya for a while, but the thing is if you’ve been in Maya land for some time, then you kinda
get to >>>>know how it works and get the best from it. Many guys like it, because they can get quiet
deep into it, but like anything >>>>it’s not without its eccentricities. If you’re gonna keep on
comparing to Soft though, then you’re in for constant >>>>disappointment. But holey moly don’t go near
Max for rigging, imho. J
As Adam says, there’s been a lot of talk on Beta about the rigging and without breeching NDAs there is
a desire to start >>>>addressing stuff. It seems the work on the parallel performance in
2016 perhaps might be the start of that. Certainly that >>>>stuff has gone down well with
people.
On the modelling front, Maya’s been going through an overhaul in recent versions. Up to 2016 there was
a lot of overlap >>>>between what was the NEX stuff and the legacy Maya tools, but a lot of
that got fixed in 2016 onwards. Imo I like the >>>>modelling in 2016, it’s in a very good
state. The improvement in the pivot editing alone was worth it.
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of >>>>Sebastien
Sterling
Sent: 24 January 2016 09:06
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: So.. Maya rigging is still a thing...
Hey Jordi Bear ! what is skinning like in Houdini ? and have you tried Fabric
for rigging ?
On 24 January 2016 at 08:56, Jordi Bares <[email protected]> wrote:
It may not be the only solution, it is really up to you.
On 23 January 2016 at 18:54, F Sanchez <[email protected]> wrote:
Its 2016 already. Is there no other app that will ever take the place of Maya? (Besides a future resurrection of
Softimage which is not >>>>>>going to happen. ) Sure I can use XSI when working on my own but if
you need to work on site it will now have to be Maya from now >>>>>>on. :(
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 8:49 PM, Sebastien Sterling
<[email protected]> wrote:
"I'm still holding out that fabric engine will become a solution for rigging"
Here, here man !
"I can paint weights and build a rig in Maya using fabric to do all the heavy work. I can paint weights
and build a rig in Maya >>>>>>>using fabric to do all the heavy work. "
so you can build a Rig in fabric, as a generalist ?
can you paint weights in it as well ?
I too hope Fabric blossoms into the next era of DCC's
On 23 January 2016 at 00:48, Michael Amasio <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm still holding out that fabric engine will become a solution for rigging. It's not all that magical for something complex in
>>>>>>>>Maya. Which as I'm sure several of you have discovered is a bit of a Maya problem. I can paint weights and build a rig
in Maya using fabric to do all the heavy work. But when it approaches the quality I require, fabric is providing all the computational speed I need ,
BUT all that speed is lost as >>>>>>>>it converts data back and forth between data Maya can use and KL. I actually get faster
results out of the new Maya GPU >>>>>>>>accelerated.
...but faster results out of XSI. Good old XSI.
I love it when a studio has like one license for XSI. I always snatch it up
and never turn my box off.
I've made a career off of lurking in the background making stuff like 5 times
faster in XSI.
I know it's childish to enjoy, but I still enjoy a good rant about the pain of
rigging in Maya.
On Jan 22, 2016 3:31 PM, "Eugene Flormata" <[email protected]> wrote:
Yah, not sure why there's no improvement in the processflow for rigging in that much time, almost in any
program i see, so >>>>>>>>>many advancements in modeling. but nothing for
rigging.
no zbrush of rigging so to speak.
I like how there's notes and tips even when you just turn on the quaddraw.
feels really thought out.
a lot of maya feels like different programs just stapled together in a package
vs XSI's whole package made for one user mentality.I just thought quad draw had
that feel to it.
I've not made any rigs in maya yet, and all my XSI rigs were pretty basic
but at least while I was rigging, i wasn't punished for something i wanted to go back and change in XSI
whenever you >>>>>>>>>learned something about your mesh you wanted to animate.
which the real benefit to the XSI over maya, it reduced the number of
iterations in the learning process.
On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 3:18 PM, Eric Turman <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm glad you are liking your new modeling tools, Eugene. However I believe that it is important to make the distinction that >>>>>>>>>>it is not about the confusion in
Maya rigging--at least not for me; I do not find Maya confusing at all. What the huge >>>>>>>>>>issue with Maya is that its limited rigging tool-set combined with
archaic workflow make the task of rigging drudgery. >>>>>>>>>>Drudgery is the key word more than confusion. I have made many character rigs in Maya over the past
fifteen-plus years >>>>>>>>>>and Maya still sucks at it.
--
www.johnrichardsanchez.com
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