Smooth skin, painting weights stubornness

[imeepmeep]

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but we're starting to do character animations in my class.

so i have a simple guy with some legs, and trying to paint weights for the various leg joints.

but maya is being stuborn and rarely ever actually painting, i can hold the mouse button down and go over some areas of the leg over and over and nothing happens cept when it randomly seems to feel like it.

it sometimes will do something if i run over onto other parts of the body by accident.

is there some trick to it?

it's taking forever at the i'll-do-it-when-i-feel-like-it rate.
--jerome

[discostu]

Try doing "Paint Effects > Make Paintable" on the Rendering menu.

-Stu

[dave_baer]

Paint weights works on the vertices of the model. If you're painting inside the polygons or on the edges, you may not get the results you're looking for. Try painting on the vertices and see what happens. Also, check the VALUE of the brush is set to 1 and the MIN/MAX VALUES are set to 0 and 1 respectively. Check the radius of your brush. Do you see a red circle or a red circle with an X in it? If you see the X that means you cannot paint on the mesh. You'll have to make the mesh paintable first before you can paint on it. Also, did you bind the skin first? Make sure you have bound the skin to the skeleton before painting weights. (to be honest, I dont think you can paint weights to an unbound mesh... can you?) Anyway. Try those tips, and if it still wont works, reply back. :)

:beer:

[imeepmeep]

What seemed to be the problem is that my mesh was a subdiv surface. It would paint every once and a while for a ton of strokes, but when i converted it to polygon and tried, it worked like i expected it to, painting vertices whenever i went over them, unlike subdiv.

is this typical or do people have no problem with doing it with subdivs too?