ConSeannery opened this issue on Jan 31, 2007 ยท 28 posts
tekmonk posted Sat, 03 February 2007 at 3:29 PM
Quote - Revisiting the original question here, (and don't get me wrong, I know what skin weights are) what exactly are skin weights mathematically? Where are they in the Poser file structure?
Poser doesn't have something like skin weights. What it does have is an influence system similar to that used by lightwave or character studio. Each bone has an area of influence and the weights applied to each vertex are calculated on the fly using these areas. AFAIK poser never explicitly stores the weights to disk so i'm not sure you can extract them like you want. This is very different from Maya where each vertex has a user specified bone weight. So the transfer isn't anywhere as simple as you may imagine.
Plus even if you do manage to transfer them, you will have done all this work just to get the same crappy deformations you get in poser. So whats the point ? Its far better to just re-skin what you need in Maya or whatever. Not only will you be able to specify nice rigs for everything, you will also be able to get proper muscle deforms, nice joint bending and any other advanced feature you may need.