headus 3D tools

[Borogove]

UVLayout worked like a dream! But does anyone know how to copy the UV map from the OBJ import to my mesh?

The Transfer Attributes function drops a big ugly transferAttributes node into my nice clean network, and necessitates keeping the import mesh. I can't delete construction history without losing my skin weights and deformers. (Delete non-deformer history has no effect).

Of course, next time I'll do UV Layout first...

Thanks!

[headus]

I'm traveling at the moment so don't have access to my test mel scripts, and being a maya novice cant remember the command, but you can copy UVs from one mesh object to another as long as they have the same topology, and as long as they're both poly objects ... it doesn't work for subdivision objects. That was in Maya7 ... might be fixed now in 8/8.5.

The reason why I didn't incorporate that code into the mel scipt I have up on the forum is because of that copying between subds not working thing ... someone has since told me though that no-one uses Mayas own subd surfaces, so I needn't worry about it :-)

Phil

[Borogove]

I finally figured out a way to do it, and keep the network clean, avoiding the inclusion of a separate mesh to drive the 'transferAttributes' node.

The trick is to have a third mesh, identical to your skinned one, but without any input nodes. (You can achieve this, if you don't have one already, by detaching the skin and deleting any deformers, exporting it, then importing it back into an unaltered version of the file you're working on). Import your OBJ file from UVLayout. Select the OBJ import mesh, then the clean mesh. Mesh -> Transfer Attributes (UV sets only). Delete history. Skin the clean mesh to your skeleton (make sure you get all the joints, and that it's in the bind pose). Select your old skinned mesh, then your new one. Skin -> Edit Smooth Skin -> Copy Skin Weights (Closest Point on Surface, Influence Association: Name). Reattach deformers.

Sounds complicated, but other methods have their problems. Trying to skin the imported OBJ mesh directly will result in chaos as soon as you try to try to attach any blend shapes because of a renaming of the vertex numbers due to the OBJ file.

Hope this helps someone else!

Cheers

[Borogove]

You'll probably have to delete the bind pose to get the second mesh skinned to the skeleton. As far as I know, this is not a useful node anyway. Type 'delete bindPose1;' (or 2 or 3 or whatever) in the command line.

Cheers.