Introduction to Maya - Rendering in Arnold
This course will look at the fundamentals of rendering in Arnold. We'll go through the different light types available, cameras, shaders, Arnold's render settings and finally how to split an image into render passes (AOV's), before we then reassemble it i
# 1 10-01-2017 , 11:18 PM
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Join Date: Jan 2017
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weight painting problem concerning random weight transfers to other joints

Hello. I've just gotten into weight painting and I've come across some problems.

First, there have been weight changes happening without my knowledge. In one instance, my finger joints have weight assigned to the chest and pelvis region of my character. This occurred before I even started to edit the weight on the fingers. In another instance, where I've deleted non-deformer history and binded a fresh new skin, the fingers initially had no weight on them until I decided to work on the spine joints and out of no where, the fingers have weight on them in the chest area as I switch to the finger joints.

Second, when I try to clear some of these extraneous weights (via paintbrush or flooding vertices), once I switch to a new joint and switch back to the same joint I had just made changes to, the weights stay the same as before and they have become impossible to remove.

user added image

How do I fix these issues? Also, what would be an ideal workflow for weight painting in Maya so that I make sure I don't run into issues like these?

# 2 11-01-2017 , 08:59 PM
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Join Date: Nov 2012
Posts: 107
This is from an older version but it should be relevant, I hope...
1. When applying Smooth Skin go into the options and choose settings that fits your geometry/joints. For example you might want the the weight distribution be set to "joint hierarchie" or to the "closest joint". This effects how good the initial skin weight is performed by Maya. Also you might want to choose only "3" joints, participating in weighting instead of the default "5". You can also choose to lock that number, so that Maya doesn't try to add weights to more joints, while painting them. Because Maya will allways try to get a skin weight value of 1 for each vertex of your geometry, unless you uncheck a feature called... umm forgot its name... anyway...

2. While painting skin weights, try to stay away from "smooth" painting. Always try to "Add" skin weight values as much as possible.

3. "Lock skin weights" on all but neighboring 2 or 3 joints while painting skin weights. That way a joint on the other end of your joint hierarchy doesn't get assigned unwanted skin weight values.

4. Use the "component editor" for larger areas of your geometry, that will get the same value. Remember to "lock skin weights" on all but the joints you want to be affected.

5. Use "Prune small weights" with an appropriate value.
That will help to get rid of small skin weight values of unwanted joints.

6. If you like to, set your workspace background color to black
in order to better see where you paint weights in white color.

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