I posted this in another forum. Thought I would share it wy my fellow MotionBuilder users....

This is really really beyond cool! (this may have been brought up before but if not Iam bringing it up) I would like to share with you what I found. Years ago an auto SKELETON BONING, RIGGING and SKINNING software was created that could AUTOMATICALLY CREATE A BONED SKELETON and the CREATE THE RIG AND SKIN it in any character mesh in less than a minute! Using very complex mathematic algorithms. Iam talking about taking a character mesh and automatically creating the skeleton in the mesh and beautifully rig it and skin it all in less than a minute! Below I have that youtube video of this. Its really not ready yet for the public (I have been waiting for it for years and years .. its called Pinocchio) ... HOWEVER, the auto skinning part of this incredible discovery IS AVAILABLE for MAYA! I tried it with Maya 2010 demo and it blew me away big time. I imported a character obj mesh in to Maya and boned it real quick. Then I clicked on the AUTO SKINNING Maya script and in seconds the mesh was SKINNED BEAUTIFULLY. Iam talking about so well skinned I did not have to do a thing. I did not have to spend hours tweaking the skinning on the character. This is a must must have script for Maya. Seems to work on Maya 2008, 2009, 2010. So, even though this does not AUTO BONE AND RIG it still AUTO SKINS and that is awesome. Below is youtube of the auto bone/rigger/skinner called Pinocchio that is not ready for public yet and the download link for the auto SKINNING script that IS part of Pinocchio and available for Maya. Have fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EklzamltEgM

http://www.creativecrash.com/may...racter/c/pm_heatweight--2

Oh yes the heat weight skinning tool is great! and this looks like one that is not a plugin that is locked to past maya versions like the other one I had,
thanks for sharing, Blender has this built in as well and I am glad it is an option for Maya agian.

Brad Clark
Co-Founder: Rigging Dojo-Teaching the art and science of character rigging
Author: Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging
The Character Animator Toolkit for Motionbuilder :available now:

Thanks for your comment Brad. I cant believe how much I love that Maya plugin. Skinning is the one thing I hate more than anything. Now in less than a minute very complex skinning is done for me. I like bringing Poser and Daz characters in to Maya. Then I rebone them quickly using bones I name with MotionBuilders naming conventions. Then I click on the the AUTO SKIN and then I export via FBX to MotionBuilder for instant characterizing. All very fast. For those interested in how to EXPORT characters from DAZ or POSER to Maya here are a couple easy ways.

Poser 8 now has COLLADA (and so does Poser Pro) export. Just export your characters via Collada and use the Maya Collada Plugin to import (or you can use OBJ but does not seem to work as well). Download link is below.

Daz Studio 3. Just use the FBX plugin to export to Maya (or of course OBJ format.

This free COLLADA export for Maya works really well for me.

http://www.opencollada.org/download.html

thank you for sharing growthweb, i dont like (not hte but dont like :) ) skinning also its time consuming… i will try it asap thank you so much

Life is a bullet…

Thanks for your reply egeman. I did not want to sound so excited but I sure am. Its just soooooo easy to take a character MESH and add these bones

hips
LeftUpLeg
LeftLeg
LeftFoot
RightUpLeg
RightLeg
RightFoot
RightArm
RightForeArm
RightHand
LeftArm
LeftForeArm
LeftHand
Head

and then use that AWESOME PLUGIN for very accurate skinning and then bring in to MotionBuilder and characterize charcter in less than a minute. I have been grabbing free mesh characters all over the web and now with that skinning plugin all is really fun and super fast. I will update more in the near future.

Yeah, I’ve used Heatweight a couple times and it definitely does a better job than the dumb standard Maya skinning. Don’t get so excited yet though, if you want professional-quality deformations that plugin it’s not good enough to save you from touching up weights (except if you’re doing a reeeally flexible toon-like character), which brings me to the question: why does Maya weight painting has to be so limited? Even with all the major enhancements of the 2011 version - after SP2 btw, new features were incredibly broken on release - I’m stiff dumbfounded as to how there’s no way to “Paint through” using the paint weights tool. In traditional (and obsolete) Artisan fashion, all you can do is paint vertexes that belong to polygons that are facing the camera. If you want to do some bulk painting, all you can do is select vertexes and flood them with a certain value. This involves two or three operations depending on your current select mode, to work correctly, and it’s just unnecessarily cumbersome. Or worse yet, if you want to set yourself back to stone age (aka. artists-forced-to-use-excel) you can use the component editor. Yuck!

Compared to Cinema4D’s weight painting it’s a joke, in that proggie you can simply uncheck the “paint visible only” option and there you go. Is that it or am I missing something?

I wonder if there’s no better weight painting option around, anybody tried using the new MudBox import FBX/weight painting functionality? Can it export weights properly after editing them?

Any help/opinions wanted, thanks in advance.

any chance for a nice full tutorial?

dazstudio to motionbuilder (create a nice animation)
characterize & skin the model.
how to do jiggle deformations in maya & will they import into motionbuilder to or?

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need to see whole proces
dazstudio to motionbuilder 2011 (create a nice animation)
& bvh file back to dazstudio…
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Hi guys.

Mate Im as happy and excited as you are...Skinning is the worst part of CG for me.

Does this plugin work with maya 2011? anyone tested it yet?

You made my day mate:)

Thanks

3D animation, VFX and comp Generalist
Nothing is impossible:)
now… how do I do this:)

I’m excited to test this out, but I can’t figure out how to install it.  The directory structure in 2011 appears to be different than in the install instructions.

The plugin is supports 2011 according to the d/l site , but no updated install info.