🧵 Untitled Thread
Anonymous at Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:21:35 UTC No. 959560
In rigging in Maya, or any other software, is it okay if I want to simply move a joint that is skinned already to the mesh, to modify the mesh in its shape? Will this break anything down the line when I add controllers? Or is using skin weights and slight move adjustments on the bones acceptable so long as I move it now before adding controls?
Anonymous at Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:23:58 UTC No. 959561
To clarify:
Do I need to remove influences, move my bones or edit my mesh, and then reapply the skinning?
Anonymous at Tue, 26 Sep 2023 02:12:07 UTC No. 959605
There is actually a "move skinned bone" tool to let you move joints without deforming the mesh.
Fixing uh ohs on skinned meshes with rigs is a time honored and shameful tradition. I have done it many times and to do many different things in maya.
Additional tools to research are
>Export/import skin weights
>Copy skin weights
One trick i have used to do the opposite of your problem (changing the mesh rather than the skeleton) is to make my edits in a blend shape i just never turn off. You can also copy weights based on uv space from your priginal mesh to a duplicate youve modified given that the uv map is the same.
Anonymous at Tue, 26 Sep 2023 02:27:55 UTC No. 959608
>>959605
>You can also copy weights based on uv space from your priginal mesh to a duplicate youve modified given that the uv map is the same.
this will only work in the 0-1 uv space my man
Anonymous at Tue, 26 Sep 2023 08:37:51 UTC No. 959618
>>959560
So if I understood correctly. You want to modify a skinned mesh?
Im a Maya user so I cant speak for blender, but in maya - if you just need to move some vertices around those modifications can happen directly on a skinned mesh and will be stored in a tweak node that maya always generates along with a deformer. In a regular fbx pipeline that tweak node gets "baked" into the model on export. So any minor vertex pushing can be done directly on the skinned model and thats it. Of course if you want to change topology or do bigger shape changes its best advised to do that on a copy of the original model and then transfer skinning over. Usually world-space transfer plus some minor weight fixing goes pretty quick.