Re-useTarget Weld Gizmo

[Anonymous]

Hey Everyone,

I searched and didn't find any other topic about what I'm looking to accomplish, so I try posting here, hoping that someone could help me with it!

So I've been spending a lot of time skinning really dense, and split polygonal objects (several shells) on Maya recently, and I used copy and paste skin weights buttons, from the PaintSkinWeights tool, a lot, mostly to avoid that shells get separated after I smooth skin weights.

And realizing the amount of clics it takes to copy weights from one vertex to another, I started wondering if, by any chance, we could possibly re-use the Target Weld Vertices gizmo from Maya, to actually copy/paste skin weights quicker.

So basically my idea is to drag and drop a vertex onto another to just match their current skin weights instead of really welding them.

Now my question is: Is there any way, in MEL or python to cast the Target Weld Vertices gizmo and get an ouptut result of targeted vertices that could then be fed into a custom callback that deals with skin weights copy?

Thanks a lot for reading my question and, for those who do, to answer me about it! 🙂

[mcw0]

It almost sounds like you are going vertex by vertex to copy and paste weights which would definitely be painful.  And I don't think you need to go down the weld route.  Repetitive tasks should definitely be scripted.  

It sounds like you have separate meshes that you'd like to keep connected so that no seams appear while deforming.  If that's the case, then instead of going vertex by vertex, you could select the common border edges.  Or you could even just select the common border edges of only 1 of the meshes. 

Then convert edges to vertices.

Loop through your border vertices

Find the matching vertex of the bordering mesh with the polySelectConstraint function in distance mode.

Query the skin weights of the matching vertex

Apply weights to the original border vertex.

[lynn_zhang]

Hello @Anonymous ,  welcome to Autodesk Community!

Just checking to see if your problem has been solved. Did the response from @mcw0 help answer your question? If yes, please click on the "ACCEPT SOLUTION" button in his reply so this helps other users in the community find the solution too. Thanks!