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Multi level skinning

Good morning.

It would be interesting if you could implement it a multiple skinClusters on a “single” mesh, useful to add secondary controls on an already skinned mesh. For example… such as a jacket.

Regards,
Alessandro_

Hello @Alessandro_Melis

Could you please be a little bit more specific? When you mean implementing a multiple skinCluster you mean you would like the skin exporter/importer to handle meshes that contains more than 1 skin cluster nodes in them?

Cheers

Buonasera Jerome.

No, I’m not referring to Import \ Export Skin.
I wish the possibility of having multiple skin levels for the same mesh was implemented.
http://www.sunekempf.com/blog/?p=18

Saluti,
Alessandro

Hello @Alessandro_Melis

Thank you for clarifying. That been said you need to understand that this isn’t something fully supported by any tool inside Maya. What I mean by that is that the Paint Skin Cluster weights will allow you to paint only the last (or the first, don’t recall exactly). That been said doing multi layering skinning is actually pretty easy and making some lines of codes to handle this is actually not hard.

The way I usually approach it while working (creating the setup) is keeping my duplicated geos that have the new layer so that I can still paint them by just reconnecting some attributes. Anyway if you are looking into a easy way to do this, just select your geometries OrigShapes and display the construction node graph in the node editor and plug the corresponding nodes from one node to the other. At this point the duplicated geometry can be deleted easily. I have some code to handle this but I do not think it worth implementing it inside mGear… @Miquel, @chrislesage what do you think?

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@Jerome similar technique is used to bypass some GPU override limitation with tweakers. But a part of that I didn’t used it for anything else. As you said any tool supports it. And is more the pain that the gains :stuck_out_tongue:

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Hi Jerome and Miquel.

In the studio where I worked, it was used a lot on clothes.
On the first level of skin I generally made a copy skin of the body, on the second level we painted the weights of the secondary controls (with rivet) to move certain parts of the dress.

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Hi @Alessandro_Melis

I would say that if you are new to Python or Mel it would be an excellent example for you to tackle. Specially that you could make this however you would want to.

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand the usage of this and I use it myself depending on the cases and type of projects (for example game engines do not support this type of things).

If you don’t see how to tackle this by script let me know and I can maybe put some lines in here for you.
Cheers

Thank you Jerome.

I wanted to suggest a new utility for mGear.
I sent you a video that explains better what I want and what it is useful for.
(Not for game.)

Cheers

Hi Jerome, a bit late here, but I would like to know if the functionality you mention here (skin importer being able to handle multiple skincluster on the same mesh) is a possibility currently, or if there is any workaround to tackle this.

Thank you!