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Losing Skinning on eyes and lips as soon as I try to paint weights

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#1

Hi there.

So I have been rigging my character using the basic mGear biped guide. All is going well, I am using ngSkinTools to do my weight painting.
But right after I use the mgear FACIAL: Eye Rigger and FACIAL: Lips Rigger to build my facial rig, I then want to go and tweak my weights for the lips, but as soon as I open the Maya paint weights tool or ngSkinTools I lose the skinning on the lips and eyes. All those joints no longer have any influence.

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#2

Ah, I see it is because I did not choose the rig parent in the options when doing the lips rigger

#3

Ah, I see it is because I did not choose the rig parent in the options when doing the lips rigger

Hmm, no, I don’t think so. It’s because of how ngSkinTools works. You can’t use both ngSkinTools and regular Maya weights at the same time.

If you have ngSkin layers on your mesh, and you do anything in regular skinning, like pruning, or smoothing, or painting with Maya’s tools, or mGear doing auto-skinning, the moment you touch the weights again in ngSkinTools, all that information will be lost, and ngSkinTools will overwrite the mesh with its layer data again.

If you didn’t lose your eyes and mouth information yet, it’s because you haven’t triggered the update on ngSkinTools yet. You just got lucky. But that information could easily get lost at any point, unless you’ve saved it to an ng layer.

If you already have layers, and want to save them you’ll have to

  1. export your ng layers to a .json file
  2. then do your lips or eyes or whatever.
  3. Turn that into a layer.
  4. Import your .json ngSkin layers and keep existing layers.
  5. Move the lips to the top of the layers stack.
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#4

Hi Chris.

Thanks, and yes I see what you are saying and that did happen once I hit the smooth button in ngSkin.
But in the mgear vid here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW4UwHbxczM this does not happen? The LIPS rigger was used and then straight away ngSkintools was used to flood smooth?

#5

He didn’t have pre-existing layers before he did the mouth autoskinning.

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#6

Okay, that makes sense.

So if i’m okay with my ngSkin layers “baking down”, I should be able to use this workflow without losing the mGear autoskinning information?:

  • “Delete all custom nodes” in ngSkintool
  • Use the mGear eye and lips rigger and let it do its autoskinning
  • re-initialize skinning layers in ngSkin tools
  • paint my weights
#7

Yep, that would work.

I love making my mouth and eyes into separate layers though. The face rig is a perfect place to use layers to have much more power to edit the weights. But if you have a relatively simple face, that would work.

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#8

Ok great. Yes, I can see how layers are really beneficial in this way.

Anyways, thanks for help. Much appreciated.

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