Final Character Deformation - Game Character Development with Maya - page 911

You have one more step to complete the weighting process on Kila, and that is to remove
any small weights that have been applied as you worked. While painting the weights, you
may have applied smaller weighting values to other joints without really noticing. These
are often relics of using the Paint Skin Weights tool's Smooth or Replace paint operations.
Upon export into the game engine, these might be removed, but if they are not they could
have an impact on the processing power of the system.
So let's get rid of them. Select the character mesh and go to Skin > Edit Smooth Skin >
PruneSmallWeights.Thedefaultvalueof0.01willworkwellinmostcases,buttobesafe,
save your scene before applying this to your model. Any values below 0.01 will be reset to
0, and the remaining weights will be normalized to add up to 1.
Final Rig Adjustments
When we created Kila's rig, we had to keep the elbow and knee position markers locked
to the elbow and knee joints. This was to prevent the base skeleton moving before it was
bound. As you have probably noticed, this can cause problems—especially in the case of
the knee icons being actually on the knee. When you move the foot, the knee tries to stay
pointing at the icon, causing the leg to flip.
Now that the mesh is bound to the skeleton, we can move these knee icons into more suit-
able positions.
1. Move the knee position icons out in front of the knees ( Figure 14.43 , left).
FIGURE 14.43 Move the knee icons and parent them to the feet.
2. Make a note of the Rotate Y attributes currently set for both feet (you will need to
reapply these values later). Reset the Rotate Y attribute on both feet back to 0 so
that the feet point exactly forward ( Figure 14.43 , middle).
3. Parent each knee icon to its corresponding foot icon.