Weight painting issues with moving vertices after skinning

[littonce]

Hello,

I moved some verts after skinning, and now they deform weirdly. I've tried Delete by type>non-deformer history, but that didn't work. I've tried exporting the weights, unbinding the mesh, and importing them back in, but that doesn't seem to work at all; the joints don't move the mesh at all even though the weight paint tool shows influence on them. I tried duplicating the mesh and copying the weights, with the same result as export/import. This is very frustrating. Nothing is working and I don't know what to do.

[littonce]

Well. It appears to have fixed itself???? Even so, I would still like to know how to export/ import weight maps, because it didn't work for me.

[stephenkmann]

usually you don't want to "move" verts after adding deformers to geometry, you may or may not have had a tweak node created when you did this.. ( either way, not a big deal) 

but you were on the right track for how to solve it. by exporting weights. unbinding. deleteing history, and re-binding and importing weights.

 a few things to keep in mind about export/importing weights.

1.  unique names for geo and joints
2. make sure to rebind to the exact same joints as before
3.  joint labeling helps tremendously
4.  if you use wt maps method of import/export.. make sure to have clean UVS
5.  naming differences can be an issue with the deform | export   / deform | import  ( ie: you can't change names.. or if you do, you need to update the xml / json files to match

I made a video a while back that sort of explores my methodology ,, maybe it will be of some help to you

https://youtu.be/f-WnjL_a-BY

hth

-=s

[littonce]

My issue is that the skeleton wouldn't move the mesh at all. I'd export weights, unbind skeleton, then import weights. And when I went to weight painting mode after that, all the bones showed the correct amount of influence on the mesh, but when I moved the bones, they did not move the mesh.

[stephenkmann]

that would be super strange, unless the skin Cluster envelope is set to 0