Amad
09-17-2009, 04:49 PM
Hey guys, this is a question for riggers or animators...
So I'm working as a generalist right now and have run into something pretty foreign to me. Let me attempt to explain it.
I have a cartooney little character with eyes, a beak, feet and top feathers. Because I haven't rigged or animated for 2 years, I had to relearn a lot of this. This is what I did.
Created constraints via aim, orient and drive key/driven key.
I painted weights and animated on this thing when his feathers, feet and beak were all separate objects. The engine prefers one combined mesh for all of those, but the eyes can be separate. That being said, when I combined all objects, the issues started popping up. The first is, he'll still adhere to his weights and I can still use all the controls to manipulate him. However, if I go into the paint skin weights tool, none of the bones are showing up in the side menu. It's like it's using the weights in practice, but I can't make maya understand that the bones and weights should affect this new combined single mesh.
That's really the main problem. I have animations on these bones and would really love to not have to start over and repaint weights AND reanimate a new guy, seeing as how it took about 8 hours total.
I'd be happy to send my .ma file to anyone if you know what to do, or if you could post up ideas that would be very helpful. Thank you!
So I'm working as a generalist right now and have run into something pretty foreign to me. Let me attempt to explain it.
I have a cartooney little character with eyes, a beak, feet and top feathers. Because I haven't rigged or animated for 2 years, I had to relearn a lot of this. This is what I did.
Created constraints via aim, orient and drive key/driven key.
I painted weights and animated on this thing when his feathers, feet and beak were all separate objects. The engine prefers one combined mesh for all of those, but the eyes can be separate. That being said, when I combined all objects, the issues started popping up. The first is, he'll still adhere to his weights and I can still use all the controls to manipulate him. However, if I go into the paint skin weights tool, none of the bones are showing up in the side menu. It's like it's using the weights in practice, but I can't make maya understand that the bones and weights should affect this new combined single mesh.
That's really the main problem. I have animations on these bones and would really love to not have to start over and repaint weights AND reanimate a new guy, seeing as how it took about 8 hours total.
I'd be happy to send my .ma file to anyone if you know what to do, or if you could post up ideas that would be very helpful. Thank you!