Maintain Max Influences when smoothing

[Corey Kinard]

First off I'd like to say congrats on such a great tool, I am really enjoying the rigging workflow with ngSkinTools. I do however have a request, I do a lot of realtime character weighting and would like the tool to respect Maya's maintain max influences when smoothing. This would make this tool a permanent part of my arsenal. :)

Thanks,

Corey Kinard

[Viktoras]

hi,

I've been waiting for someone to bring this up:] Yeah, max influences was something I've been considering since day 1 as well. The problem with max influences is that it's pretty complicated when you take layers into consideration. Imagine that you maintain max influences on two layers, but when they're joined together, you're possibly exceeding the limit, because layer 1 had influences A and B, and layer 2 had influences B and C on same vertex.

Ideas I've had so far was:
* do influence limiting as a post-process, that is, you paint influences as you wish, but when weights are written to skin cluster, only max N influences are chosen per vertex;
* add a special diagnostics display where you can see amount of weights truncated due to max limits
* set infl. limit per layer
* instead of max. influences number, add special mask where you set how much influences you want for each area (e.g., 3-4 for shoulder, but 1-2 for arm or torso);

Anyway, would be good to get more input from gamedev riggers, how they imagine this to be.