Warning: Skin Definition

Rigging
#1

Hi there,
I have a export problem that keeps bothering me now and then. When I’ve rigged and skinned a model and tries to export it to a fbx, this message appears “Warning: Skin Definition” “The plug-in has found the following skin definition problems : Unable to find the bind pose for :” and so on.

To fix this error I export my skinweights, detach my skin, get rid of my skin cluster, bind the skin again and then import my weights again. This works perfectly fine. I’ve googled this lots of times but I just can’t find the reason why this happens. I’m in the middle of a production right now and I find it very frustrating and unnecessary, like all problems you don’t know the cause of.

Now I turn to you tech-artists, dose anyone know the cause of this problem and how can I avoid this to happen in the future?

Thanks,
Johanna

#2

You forgot the part where you have to turn around three times and hop on one leg.

I think everyone who reads this will chuckle a bit and say, “Oh yeah, that.”

I couldn’t tell you the specific cause. I suspect that there are many, and that they can all be lumped into the category of “construction history”. For example, I bet if you inspect the Maya file, you will see that there are tweak nodes, etc. that are applied after the weighting data. Sometimes “delete non-deformer construction history” can clean this stuff up, and sometimes not.

I would bet that just about everyone here has a script that automates the process you describe…

The tremendous lack of competition in the 3D arena isn’t going to help get this kind of stuff improved in Maya any time soon.

#3

Well, depending on what you’re gonna do with your .fbx, you might not need the correct bindpose I guess? … I’ve seen the error many times and it’s never caused me any problems.

Although; what I’m doing is importing the rig keyed in bindpose on frame 0 (or with no keys at all) into motionbuilder to rig it up there. If you’re doing something else with your .fbx I guess it might be a bigger problem.

I’ve always written it off as “the fbx exporter screams over a lot of issues that aren’t issues at all”.

Anyway - the Warning is related to some nodes not being bound in the specific skin cluster. This is not a problem since you don’t really need the bindpose for bones that have no skin weights attached to them. If you wanna fix it, try searching among “Remove unused influences” would be my first try.

#4

Thank you very much for your answers!

Next time this happen I’ll delete non-deformer history and hope for the best.
I’m going to do a script for the skinweightexport and all of that, I have just been too lazy to do it untill now.

Oskar: I’ll use this fbx to export it once again, now to XMD, Morphemes format. And Morpheme hates Skin Definition-warnings…

Thanks again
/Johanna