Copying skin weights One-to-one transferring, but deformations are wrong..

[ninthtale]

So I have a nearly identical mesh. Properly duplicated, made changes, then began rebinding the mesh to the original skeleton.

This of course will change the vertices' index numbers, but that's fine; Maya's copy weights is pretty good about figuring out what goes where. These are my settings:

But I'm running into a problem I can't for the life of me identify. As you can see in this component editor table, the vertexes in rifleShape and rifleNew1Shape are perfectly matched to their respective joints:

However, this is the deformation I'm getting:

The new bind is bulging out, even though the joint and vertex placements and weights are identical. There is absolutely nothing different other than the UVs (which has never been a problem for me before), yet the deformations are misbehaving terribly, and I can't seem to adjust the weights to where I want them, even when manually painting them. No combination of weights pulls them into position.

Does anyone have any clue what's going on?

 Thank you

[Kahylan · Accepted solution]

Hi!

This is just a guess, because figuring out what is going wrong with a deformation is practically impossible without a before and after or seeing it in motion.
But could it be that your two meshes have different bind poses? Meaning that when you skinned the first mesh the rig was in a slightly different pose to when you skinned the second mesh.

The skincluster calculates transformation in relation to the bind pose, which would explain why it behaves differently for the same movement.

Also you could check if both skinclusters have the same settings in the Attribute editor. Maybe one is caluclating dual quarternion and the other one classic linear or something like that....

[ninthtale]

Thank you! The problem turned out to be the binding calculation; the original had been Classic Linear, and the new one was Dual Quaternion.