No matter what you call it: enveloping, weighting, skinning, binding is a tedious and slow process or is it? I’ve been using a technique that has allowed me to weight characters at ‘break-neck’ speeds for over a year and I think it’s about time I share my workflow.
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Prerequisite knowledge:
When I first started getting into rigging I spent some time taking a hard look at how Maya reacts to different workflows for weighting. I came to realize by watching the component editor in Maya while painting weights – stray or loose values could/would be caused by numerous tools available to you while painting weights. Below is a review of the discoveries I found as a result.
- 1)Many of the tools/options available are present because they were easy to implement and add – not because they aid or increase the functionality of the toolset. For example:
- a.Radius (L) – I always have that set to 0. In fact is it’s above 0 I have found that it interferes with my ability to use the ‘b’ hotkey to control the size of the brush on-the-fly.
- b.Opacity: This is always set to 1, why not just use the hotkey ‘n’ to control the value.
- 2)Every paint operation but ‘add’ has the potential to create stray values.
- a.Replace with any value other than 1.
- b.Scale with any value.
- c.Smooth with any value and more than 2 influences.
As a result I have limited my painting toolset to radius (U), value, add, mirror, smooth. I’ve also discovered some rules to increase the reliability of various functionalities. For example any weight I/O process (export/import/mirror) works best with normalized (all influences add to 1) weights.
Now for the good stuff – Overweighting:
As a result of that knowledge I found it extremely important to find a way to skin a character and avoid stray and un-normalized values. The workflow I came up with, and have since dubbed ‘overweighting’ is simple and requires some practice but once your used to it is the fastest way of weighting a character I’ve seen and has allowed me to weight characters in a single pass to more than acceptable quality. The concept is this – never add weight to an influence twice. Rather overweight an influence and go down chain till you run out of influences to weight.
But if a picture is worth a thousand words, than a video must be a box set of novels so here you go:
Overweighting (h264 codec/qt7 req)
So the general workflow:
Paint all your weights using the overweighting method (add only) then mirror to get the best data for an optional smooth/mirror pass.
The execptions!
Like all methods/workflows there are exceptions, however I find this methodology works on almost all models I recieve. That said, my early warnings on replace/scale don’t hold when painting cluster weights. I find scale helpful during that operation. Unforutnatly I never use replace – add is far less likely to redistrubute values.
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