"Finger" joints affecting other "fingers" in Maya even after painting weights..

[Anonymous]

Screen Shot 3 : Shows one of the errors in question for one of the joints(#12) that are effected
IMG_1518.jpg : Shows finished render for anyone curious
Screen Shot 4: Shows weighted-skin paintings for one of the joints(#12)

I'll start by saying I'm still learning but... I've created a pretty cool looking hand, it's not exactly anatomically correct or human but it has the same structure besides finger length. I've made several knuckles on all fingers, but whenever I try to move some of them they affect the joints on other fingers nearby. I've looked up "Skin Weights" and I've removed the influencing weight color from nearby fingers by CTRL+ Clicking best I can without removing the original influences.

Even after skin weight painting and checking every joint for possible influence on other joints it's still affecting them... I'll attach images to help get a better understanding of what's going on. Not sure if there's a value somewhere I have to change or something simple I'm skipping over. I've HEARD of IK and FK handles but I'm not sure if that's what I need here, and if it is, is there any way to convert the regular joints into these IK/FK Handles? 

Any input helps! Images attached.

****ALSO I'm having issues with lighting and the only one I can use to get an object to be visible when rendering are the directional lightings after scaling them very drastically and pointing it through my object from multiple directions. I just need a well-lit object, and if changing the background color is possible I would also love that. If you can direct me to any instructional posts/videos that helped you in the past I would greatly appreciate it

(Maya 2019)

[jmreinhart]

When using maya's skin painting tool it can frustrating to track down weights like that. In the Paint Skin Weights Tool you will see a gradient option. Turn on "use color ramp" and pick the rainbow preset. If you use these settings small weight values will show up as blue instead of very dark grey so it will be easier to see if you have weird weights on some verts.

Do you know how to use the weight locking in the Paint Skin Weights Tool? If not be sure to watch a tutorial for the tool before continuing painting weights.

If you are scaling the joints and the skinning mode is "dual quaternion" that could explain the weird deformations. If that's the case, turn on "support non-rigid transforms on the skinCluster node.

IK and FK stand for inverse kinematics and forward kinematics. They only matter if you are trying to rig your model. 

[Luke3dMotion]

Try looking at the vertex skin values using the Component Editor (Windows ->General Editors -> Component Editor). With the Component Editor open and scroll along to the "Smooth Skin" tab, select the vertices in question and check their values there.

The CE gives numerical values ranging from 0 -> 1 (with 0 being no influence and 1 being max influence) and states what joints are influencing each selected vertex.

If you're skin weights are correct even according to the CE, then it is likely an error has occurred during the skinning process as translating, rotating and scaling won't cause that kind of deformation if your weights are correct.

[Anonymous]

***this was meant to reply to Jonah but yeah Luke in that window I just hit smooth skin and everything fell into place

Hey bud thanks for replying. So I actually found a solution to this another way and I forgot to update. There was a setting somewhere, which I forget where, that gave me the option to smooth the joints. As soon as I did that they started working perfectly. Whether or not painting the weights did anything is beyond me but I know as soon as I did that it was working perfectly. Probably because the mesh itself was smoothed to begin with.

[jmreinhart]

Ah, sounds like your weights weren't normalized. Glad you found a solution.

[Anonymous]

Actually, while I have you, could you tell me how to a assign a bifrost to an object? Whenever I add aero bifrost it just goes to the center of the grid, and doesn’t center around the object or move with it. I’m assuming i have to add it in a different way and then bind it somehow so it’ll also move with the object during animations?.... cause I can’t figure that out at the moment and the videos keep saying to select the object and then add the bifrost but that keeps happening... I’ve tried it from the toolbar and the shelf :/... I’d do it manually but I’m not sure how to properly move the three different nodes that come with the bifrost effect correctly and the closest I got to positioning just doesn’t seem to have the same effect...

Also is it possible to apply the bifrost to each face of the object? Because I noticed it only emits in one direction in general.

[jmreinhart]

I have not had a chance to look into bifrost yet. You should post a separate question