Editing Skinned Mesh

[timdan]

So... I had to modify the geo of a character that was provided to us (pre-rigged), and normally it's a non-issue. This time, however, when we tried to animation the character verts that should have been welded were breaking apart, and the UV map was going nuts.

If I Delete by Type: History, then we loose the skin cluster. Is it possible to make these kinds of mesh changes without completely breaking the rig? How can I get rid of my edit history, but keep the skinning?

[tdHendrix]

A quick thing to try is to use Edit->Delete by Type->Non-Deformer History instead and see if it fixes it.

To make a model edit which will change the vertex order you can do this to keep most of the skinning:

1. Duplicate the model and hide the original.
2. Make the geometry edits on the duplicated model.
3. Delete any modeling history on the updated model.
4. Skin the duplicated geometry with the edits to the same joints as the original skinned model.
5. Select the original model, then select the updated model, and go to Skin->Copy Skin Weights.
6. If everything copied correctly you can delete the original model.

Depending on the model changes you might have to do minor skinning touch ups after transferring the skinning.