Skin weights deforming incorrecly

[stu.e.gray]

Hi all,

I am pretty new to all this, but I am having problems with painting skin weights on my character.  The only issue seems to be the hands, more specifically the fingers:

It almost seems like the mesh is being pushed away from the bone when I paint.  The other hand does something similar, but not this extreme.

I am not sure where to begin to troubleshoot this.  The model was provided by my school for us to practice rigging a HumanIK skeleton.

Thanks

[stu.e.gray]

I think I figured it out actually... I read another post later about having two bind poses.  I went under Rigging then from the menu Skin>Go to Bind Pose and I guess that puts the skeleton into the position when the skin was bound to it. the last finger joints were all in the wrong position, way below the hand where they needed to be.  I used Move Skinned Joints to reposition and it is now working correctly.

I don't know what caused the joints to drop down like that in first place, because I don't remember ever having them in that position, but I am happy it is fixed.

Thanks

Stu

[hamsterHamster]

The orientation of the selected joint seems somewhat suspicious, hard to tell from a picture.

Try selecting the misbehaving finger vertices and go to Windows > GeneralEditors > ComponentEditor > SmoothSkins tab. See there, if the influences come from those neighboring joints only, not from elsewhere, like root/head/toe.

If I were you, I'd disable MaintainMaxInfluences in skin cluster option, so to avoid loosing joints influences accidentally.

Also, use Skin > PruneSmallWeights to clean up noise.

If all fails, send zipped MA file of your character.