Maya 2017 Character weight painting problems

[tevin93]

Hi everyone

I feel like I'm becoming a nuisance on here with all my questions and bad modeling but I have my character model that I have rigged to the best of my knowledge and now I'm at the point where I need to paint the skin weights and influences. I'm not sure I completely know what I'm doing but I'm slowly figuring it out however I'm not sure how I would paint the weights on my character. The character itself is meant to be a moving mountain so he's made of rock and stone so his body should be very stiff with very little deformations. I'm using Maya 2017 with the latest update package

So my query is does anyone know the best way they can think of for me to paint the skin weights for this mountain golem?

When I try and paint the skin weights I get this message in the Mel script // Warning: Specified weight could not be set due to locked influences..

I have attached screenshots of the model and weight painting tool window

Any kind of help would be amazing

[gautham.chandran47]

Maybe it has something to do with the "max influence " you set while binding the skin ? 

Or try changing the normalization mode to "post".

If note share the file and I'll take a look at it.

Hope this helps 

[tevin93]

Hi

Thank you for replying

This whole thing is got me for a loop and I'm not sure what I'm doing. I thought I knew but almost everything I've tried doesn't seem to be working properly 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hey tevin93,

I opened up the scene and reviewed your setup.

The only time I've ever seen that warning popup is when an influence is locked. When trying to paint the vertices affected by an influence that is locked, it will not adjust those values per that influence. Therefore a warning populates. That's my limited understanding of how that works.

When I paint weights, I like to weight everything in chunks and then fine-tune it little by little. Locking influences is very crucial to make sure Maya isn't automatically adjusting your weights to un-intended joints (for instance, when you smooth your weights, it will look for surrounding unlocked influences).

So far, everything looks to be fine as far as painting the weights, I'm not receiving that warning. I did notice you have already locked certain influences in the paintWeights UI. I also noticed you're normalizing your weights as "Post."

One recommendation I can make is this.

I tend to use "Interactive" so that my weights are respecting MY values and not spilling over to other joints and their influence. They also obey values between 0 and 100%, nothing above that.

After inspecting your weights thus far using the Post method, the vertices are going above 100% for influence, so your mesh won't exactly operate within the 0-100% parameters. Influences affect them in a different way and I'm not a huge fan of it.

I went to your skinCluster1 on the mesh and changed the weight normalization to "Interactive" and played around with it, so there shouldn't be any difficulty changing its current status. You may see some undesired results at first, but this allows you to control a vertex from 0-100% affected by however many influences the skinCluster1 allows for one vertex.

Using the component editor is phenomenal because you can control the exact vertex weight based on your selection.

You can open that from Window > General Editors > Component Editor. Switch the tab at the top to the Smooth Skins tab.

This will display all selected vertices and show you which joints are affecting them and by how much. GREAT place to start when skinning weights.

Good luck to you, hopefully this helps out a little bit.