Skinning breaks after Set max influencer to 4 (Maya)

Hi guys,
First of all a greeting at everyone!
I’m new and just registered… and I have a question that driving me crazy.
I skinned a character for game with max influencer to 5.
Now I want to change the max influencer to 4 because I have to integrate some parts with PhysX.
PhysX to works well needs meshes skinned with the max influence to 4… but I have a big issue when I try to change the max influencer by Edit Influences > Set Max Influences.
After making the change all the skinning breaks… I don’t know why? and I don’t know how to solve it…
Someone have a solution?
I hope I don’t have to redo all skinning from head to head…

Ps. Sorry for my bad English is not my primary language

You are letting Maya automatically change your weights. You cannot possibly expect a good result from that.

Sorry, but you will probably have to do one of the following:
a) redo your weights
b) check the weights that have more than 4 influences, and carefully clean them up.

Using the “prune small weights” or changing max influences or using “keep max influences” checked is generally going to give you awful, terrible results, and I do not recommend it.

To make skinning in Maya a lot less painful, you should check out ngSkinTools. It lets you paint weights using layers. By keeping different parts on different layers, it makes it easy to clean up issues like this with more confidence.

Maybe someone has a tool that is smart about reassigning weights, but I’ve never seen it.

Thank you Clesage,
Ok… my greatest fear has materialized I have to repaint all the weights :sob:
I think is the only solution because checking all the vertex will be an exhausting work.
But I read that a user has a script that does it automatically in this thread:
http://discourse.techart.online/t/maya-skinning-limit-max-influences/505

Yeah you can use that script David created to see where the influence is over 4, ngskin tools also has a good vertex weight limit adjustment. You shouldn’t have to redo all the weights just any area that you have had to fine tune watch out for issues as you reduce the weight.

Ok Yesss solved
I think this is the better solution
I found other scripts that for me they have solved the situation.
First of all I ran this mel scipt:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/community/community-content-tools-and-tutorials/78692-max-influence-script-for-maya
This script has reduced the percentage of the weights with 5 or 6 influences without creates artifacts.
Then I found this other python script:


With this script I can check the max influence and select the vertex
Then all the rest of work with few vertex remained I completed it with the comnponent editor.

But but the thing I don’t understand is that in the component editor Maya calculate influences values that have 0.000
Why??

I wrote a little script that would check number of influences and select as well. And I also noticed that 0.000 weights would remain.

My solution was to prune small weights with a very tiny value of 0.001 or 0.0001. Small enough that it won’t change any of your weights, but big enough that it removes all the 0.000 values.

Why? Because Maya. :smirk: