CS 838 Project 2 Docs : Importing Skin Weights

At this point, we knew that we had a large amount of motion data in skeletal form. So, we had to create a fast way to get this data into Maya, and get one of our characters skinned to the imported data.

We decided that the fastest way to do this would be to skin each character once, and then copy these weights to skin a charcter to a new motion.

So, I wrote MEL scripts that imports one of our MEL skeleton-motion scripts and the character geometry, and then imports the skin weights previously defined for that character.

The interface is simple, I even made some shelf icons.

In practice, this method proved to be very slow because for each piece of geometry, there is an image that defines the weights for each joint in the skeleton. So, for example, the skin of the knight character has 22 pieces * 25 joints = 550 image files. Just opening these files is very slow.

An alternate method is to copy skin weights in Maya from one character to another. We used this for the Dr. Evil character escpecially because the model is composed of 80 pieces. (80 * 25 = 2000 images)

 

Lessons learned:

1. don't use a crappy model. There is no set of skin weights that will make a crappy model look better.
2. if possible, use a continuous mesh for your model. This will generally simplify your life, and prevent breaking in the skin during animation.
3. look into the copySkinWeights command in the MEL reference.

 

Download import/export skin functions: projUtils.zip

Download interface to copySkinWeights: copyPieceWeights.zip

Last updated May 10, 2002. Luke Tokheim