E4 Ident Progress (Maya) - Painting Weight Influences

With the controllers working the skeleton was moving correctly so the next step was to combine the mesh to the skeleton. I did this by selecting the skeleton and the mesh and applying a smooth bind from the skin menu under the animation menu set. My mesh was now attached to the skeleton but the mesh was not moving well with the skeleton as some verts from the hand would be connected to the torso or leg for example so whenever the hand would be moved, certain verts would not move with the hand and would instead stay put stretching the mesh of the hand. To solve this problem i used the paint skin weights tool to alter how much certain vertices are weighted down to each bone.

I didn't find this process particularly hard but it was very time consuming and i had to go over each joint multiple times to make sure every part of my character was moving as it should. An important part of this process was putting my character in extreme positions to test the model to make sure it is capable of a wide range of positions. The biggest problem that i had was the elbow joints, because of the way i had modeled it the elbow joint was right at the adjacent polygon intersections of the sleeve to the arm. This made the elbow polygons deform unrealistically, i played around painting the skin weights and figuring out the best arrangement of skin weights for the elbow so it didn't deform too badly but at least i know for next time to pay attention to areas that will be deforming when modelling and also adding more edge loops to these areas. i had a few other problems but i worked out solutions for them.

For some unruly vertices and when there were vertices that were hard to paint i used the component editor to manually input the weight values of the vertices to each bone. The total value for each vertex is 1 but this value is split up to different bones. To fix vertices i had to change the values so that the bone the vertex was meant to be attached to has a higher percentage weight influence than the other bones.