Skinning Tool Smarts

[MobileDude]

I have a character with a utility belt... it has a few grenades and a canteen hanging on it. Of course, it turns out my bind pose doesn't have the arms sticking straight out. So, when I bind to a skeleton, half of the grenade polys travel with some of the finger bones. Yeah, you know where this story goes ...now I have to find the bones that mapped to those polys, paint weights, etc. (or move the arms far enough out of the way.)

Here's a thought: When I create UVs, I can create seams that allow the UVs to unfold properly for mapping. I wish I could establish "bone zones" (bounding boxes?) or better yet, poly groups that would help in the bind process. Maybe somehow using the UVs as a guide? (hey, just brainstorming here).

While painting, I run into many situations where a hard to get vertex is stuck to the wrong bone, I have to fiddle with the brush and search through the bones to find the problem. I'm also not fond of how the brush feels... kind of clumsy, but I can't think of a solution off the top of my head, other than I'd rather not have to paint weights at all. Seems like there should be a better way to do binding in general.

There's a lot of information converging in this workflow... polys, their position in space, adjacency to others, normal angles, UVs and UV seams, the proximity to a bone, the bone is in a hierarchy, the length of a bone (finger bones are typically shorter than leg bones), bone rotation, and I'm sure many other qualities I'm overlooking. So there must be a better way to process these relationships to get a better automatic result for most humanoid character purposes. Obviously, if all your characters are born of an octopus race from the future, all bets are off.

[podperson]

The new bone heat skinning is amazingly good. I think you're asking for a lot for one skinning system to deal with so many potential inputs. Arguably the best solution would be script APIs for vertex assignment — then you could implement all this magic yourself.