Soft Binding
 

O.K. I have a character that I have converted successfully to Maya (Alf) I rigged him up and did a walk cycle for the little bleeder. I noticed anomalies on the surface of the model which needed the soften/harden normals command. I applied this and it fixed me problem, however I noticed that therewas some stuff in the history so I did a delete by type history...

Then all of a sudden me mesh was frozen... seemed by deleting by type history had removed the binding of the mesh? The skeleton walked on but the mesh stayed where it was. Is this what it is supposed to do? I would have thought once bound deleting the history wouldn't touch this an make the file smaller?

Anyone got any ideas?

once you bind you cannot delete the history, or, as you have seen, the binding gets deleted as well.

Thanks for the reply Mike! Hmmm, that does seem a rather cumbesome way of doing things... I say that because say you decide that you want to alter the model and you tweak a load of polygons (exactly like I have been doing) and then the model slows down because of the history getting large. You then delete the history and the binding goes? Not very flexibe to me!

Instead, do you unbind the model do your tweaks and modifications, delete the history, then rebind to the skeleton. Great, but what about all the hours of painting weight maps on the thing will they all be lost and you'd have to start again? I haven't looked to see if you can save the maps and reapply them. Either way it seems a bit clunky to me...

Is there a tutorial out there that explains this better? I have the Character Animation book from Sybex, but I haven't read that far yet.

You can select individual history items and delete them. I'm not sure how deleting a lot at one time affects the model, though, as I've never had to do that.

You just go into the attribute editor, select the history tab at the top, press the "select" button at the bottom, and in your scene, press the delete key to get rid of it.

Gee Fanks Mate! I will try that over the weekend - I did wonder if you could delete individual items.

When I delete by type history it deletes all my edits so I am not sure what you mean when you say that you have never had to do that?

You can export your skin weights to external files (Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Export Skin Weight Maps) and then reload them later (Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Import Skin Weight Maps) after you've modified your mesh. Some of the weights might not be perfect, but it's far better than redoing everything.

Yes,that's true, too, danny.

What I meant was, I generally tend to make sure the model is how I want it before binding, so I've not had to delete a whole lot of history items individually before.