Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 10.41
Influence area of the
knee; notice it's from the knee down
to where the ankle takes over.
4. Watch for vertex twitching. Even when you think the skin weight is
painted well, test and look carefully for spots where the mesh is twitching
(especially along the thighs near where the hands are). This twitching of
vertices means that there is trace influence on a vertex (sometimes this can
be cleaned via Animation>Skin>Edit Smooth Skin>Prune Small Weights).
5. Remember that there is a Mirror Skin Weights function (Animation>Skin>Edit
Skin Skin>Mirror Skin Weights). This isn't an ideal situation to use it since
the character isn't exactly symmetrical (especially with all the guns and
knives and diagonal straps), but it can be useful as long as you're willing
to go back and rework some of the rigid bind sections (guns, etc.).
6. Get that brush small and then big again. Especially when working on
areas like the fingers, sometimes the process is working down one vertex
at a time. A small brush will allow for exact painting. Scaling the brush up
and down often makes for a much faster work flow.
7. Paint while posed. Painting skin weights is possible even when the
character isn't in a neutral pose (called Bind Pose, or the pose the joints
were in when they were bound to the mesh). So raise that arm up, pull
that foot up and then paint on the mesh so that the deformed places look
right, or so you know which vertices are being pulled away when they
shouldn't. Then, zero out the rotation values for any joints you rotated in
the upper body, and zero out the translation and rotate values for the foot
handles if you moved the foot.
8. Remember that sometimes the easiest way to get to vertices (as in to
paint them) is from inside the mesh. This is especially true for areas like
the back beneath the backpack or inside the mouth.
9. Save often. [sarcasm] Not that Maya ever crashes [sarcasm]; but it crashes
more often while painting skin weights. It's easy to get lost in the black
and grays of the process, but it is especially painful to lose work due to a
crash while painting skin weights. Save often.
