SCRIPT: cutSkin v1.1
AUTHOR: Christian Stejnar - Technical Artist
CONTACT: christians73@yahoo.de
WEB: www.8ung.at/stejnar
DATE: 01/06/2006
BUGFIX in v1.1:
Fixed issues in detaching skinning information into rigid body parts. In some cases using Maya 7.0 there were remaining mesh parts as intermediate meshes - time and memory consuming - thx for the feedback!
DESCRIPTION:
The basic idea of cutSkin was to convert a smooth skinnned geometry into a separated group of single meshes - each single separated mesh ist parented to its most influencing bone. The result is a "rigid" version of your smooth skinned mesh - good for playback - easy to animate!
WORKFLOW:
Simply select a smooth skinned mesh and press the "START" button. This will convert the given mesh to a collection of separated rigid meshes parented to their corresponding bones - these resulting meshes are stored in two different layers. Layer "CutSkin" holds the parented and separated results of the smooth skinned mesh - layer "SourceMesh" holds the original mesh. If checked in UI the resulting cutSkin meshes are reduced by the given percentage.
The workflow consists ob three automatic steps:
1. Polygon reduction (if checked in UI)
2. Gathering skinning information in order to sort the vertex information per joint (max. weight per joint)
3. Detaching the vertices on the given max. weights per joint into new meshes and parenting them to the joint hierarchy.
INSTALL:
Place the MEL file in one of your Maya script folders, start Maya and type cutSkin in your commandline
MAYA:
Currently tested in Maya6.5 and Maya 7.0
Please use the Feature Requests to give me ideas.
Please use the Support Forum if you have any questions or problems.
Please rate and review in the Review section.
