Binding Skeleton to Mesh without Weights

[Anonymous]

How can I bind the skeleton to the mesh without weight paints? I want to do all of it myself.

[gautham.chandran47]

Follow these settings to get the best results without editing the skin weights.

[Anonymous]

This isn't answering my question. I WANT to do the weight painting, I don't want Maya to give me approximate results. 

[kttender]

You HAVE to start with one of the Maya binds. I suppose you could go one at a time by binding the entire mesh to a single joint in your hierarchy, and then adding each joint you want one at a time with Skin > Edit Influences > Add Influences, but to be honest, that's a really weird way to do it.

If you want to paint every joint in by hand, my advice would be to use Closest distance as your binding method. Sometimes people prefer to labor over their skin weights and do this.

[mspeer]

Hi!

The simple answer is, you can't.

A weighting of "0" for all joints would result in an incorrect display (like a scaling of "0").

However you could assign a weighting of "1" for one joint and start with a weighting of "0" for all other joints.

[gautham.chandran47]

Okay, then select the influence of root joint and paint it with full skin weight ( 1 ) and then you can add the influence of other joints as you like. Actually that's the process of manual skin weighting.