MAYA - Character Rigging Help Please

I am working to animate a simple model i created in maya of a human…i rigged it with joints and binded the skin and seems to work find…but the problem im having is when i move the right arm or right leg, the right side of the model gets messed up…but when i move the left arm or left leg, the joints work fine and only move along the arms mesh…i provided a picture to show what i mean … i also provided a screen shot of my outliner

i been trying to figure out what may be the problem and i cant figure it out…my geometry is perfectly mirrored (did this when i was modeling the character) and the joints are mirrored as-well…i binded the skin using smooth bind with a max influence of 3… all help is greatly appreciated!


Does the skinning work correctly in Maya?

Make sure that you have “4 bones per vertex” in quality settings in Unity (“2 bones per vertex” is the default one IIRC).

Try checking the weighting? Does the weight mapping still look identical on both sides? Also try mirroring the weights if everything is symmetrical, and see if that fixes it.

Make sure that the character is sitting at the origin, and the mesh was mirrored across the X axis. Maya’s weight mirroring doesn’t work if it’s even a bit away from the origin. Another thing to do would be to select just the parts of the character that are breaking and mirror again.

Also, make sure you select all verts except the ones directly on the mirror plane.

I’ve also found that sometimes the mirroring breaks in 2010/2011, and joints that were influences don’t get re-added. Make sure that the influence you want the mirroring to be set to is actually a part of the skin.

Im really new to all of this so sorry for the noob response…

when i tried to mirror the weight, i get an error saying “Joint 17 is not in a skinCluster”

I then realized when i select my right arm/leg and it’s joints, the OUTPUTS shows that there is only one skinCluster…but when i select any of the joints on the left side of the body, the OUTPUTS show that there are 3 skinClusters…

You have three skin clusters? wow, have you tried deleting the history and then selecting the skeleton’s root node, and doing another smooth bind? and see if the problem still occurs, your first bind could just have some strange errors in it.

I deleted all history and re applied the skin but im still getting multiple skin clusters…hmmm

Your Hierarchy shows your mesh is split up into multiple different meshes? That could have something to do with it, but I doubt it. try combining all the mesh pieces together to test it. Or you can upload the mesh and rig and I can look it over.

I tried combining the mesh and im getting the same result…i attached my maya file…i appreciate the help

431205–14950–$smoothskeleton.zip (538 KB)

I could look at this for you if you post an .ma file. Or an FBX. I am still on 2010.

Is this what you are looking for?

431307–14951–$MA_skeleton.zip (629 KB)

Yup. That was what I needed.

So, I took a look at your file, and while there was only one skin cluster, you have a couple other problems.

First, your geometry is way to dense. You should really try and reduce the amount of polys in the mesh, for two reasons. The first being that it will improve your modeling skills. The second is that it will aid with your second problem, which is the weights on the model are what is causing that jaggy look. None of the weights are smoothed out.