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Character Setup

Paint skin weights

Warning If you want to paint smooth skin weights on a polygon mesh, then the mesh’s UV maps must be clean and free of overlapping UVs. Otherwise, undesired results will occur.

To paint smooth skin point weights

1. Select the smooth skin objects you want to paint.
2. Go into smooth shading mode by selecting Shading > Smooth Shade All (hotkey: press 5).
3. Select the Paint Skin Weights Tool and open the Tool settings editor (Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Paint Skin Weights Tool > ).

Note Reflection is disabled for the Paint Skin Weights Tool. Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Mirror Skin Weights can be used as an alternative method to do reflection of the skin weights.

4. Check that Color Feedback is turned on in the Display section. Color feedback helps you identify the weights on the surface by representing them as grayscale values (smaller values are darker, larger values are lighter).

Tip You can use the default hotkey +c (Windows and Linux) or +c (Mac OS X) to turn Color Feedback on and off outside the Tools Settings Editor.

5. Select a joint. The values you paint set how much this joint influences the painted vertices relative to the other joints making up the smooth body (up to the number specified as the Max Influence in the Smooth Bind Skin Options window).

Note When using the Paint Skin Weights Tool, you can not select the joint you want to paint the weights for through the Maya marking menus. Instead, you need to select the joint from the list of influences in the Paint Skin Weights Tool settings or -click on a joint and then use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate your character's joint hierarchy.

6. Do on of the following:
• In the Influence section of the Tool Settings editor, click the joint name in the Transform box.
• -click on the joint you want to paint to display a marking menu, then drag north and select Paint Weights. The Tool Settings editor must be open.

Values with more influence appear lighter, values with less influence appear darker.

7. Select a brush, paint operation, and value and define other settings as required. See Deform > Paint Cluster Weights Tool in the Cluster deformer chapter of the Deformers guide, noting that the settings are the same for the Paint Cluster Weights Tool.
8. Drag the brush across the skin.

Tip You can list joints Alphabetically or By Hierarchy in the Transform box. Alphabetically is best if you know the name of the joint that has the skin weights you want to paint. By Hierarchy lists joints in the same order as the Outliner. The top of the list shows the root joint of the hierarchy, while each child joint is listed below its parent. This order is useful if you are painting a single a region of the skin—The joints you need to select from the list while painting are typically next to one another.