Articulation deformation problem

[brayce4]

hi, I got a fairly basic question about skin deformations when animating : how can I tweak vertices around articulations of a character to make them deform nicely during animation ??
For example, the thighs of my character got thin when I raise his leg, so I optimized the skinning as I could but it can't prevent deformations in every pose... then I tried setting driven keys on the mesh vertices but when I started moving the parent bone of my driving bone, the mesh started to react weirdly, plus the driven key makes maya get slow and my setup started to break at some point

so, is there any way to correct skinning under maya?

huh, pardon if this thread belongs more to the setup section, I didn't know exactly where to put it.

thanks

[joojaa]

Show us the weightmaps because looks to me your trasitions are WAY too harsh. looking more like rigid binding than naything else.

so, is there any way to correct skinning under maya?

Yes offcourse but first lets examine what you got. Pushing crap in  tends to be crap out. So fisrt we would need to evaluate your job and fix that and then start of n the extra bits and pieces.

[brayce4]

kay, thanks for minding.
so, just for the thigh example, here are the maps :

with those I have this, rotating the hip bone in Z only (the first shot I posted was rot Y+Z) :

but if I smooth the pelvis influence, of course I obtain this :

... which is not quite right. Maybe I should have placed the hip bone a bit forward there, but I have the same kind of problem for the shoulders and elbows that cannot be solved that way.

[joojaa]

Ok, you should let  the areas be smooth but let them regins do a bit higher, so part of the prblem si that, second i think the joint may be slightly misplaced. And then you should try to use.

See thing is your leg starts turing at halfway where it actually does all wjite 2 plyugon higher. the hip joint wont haceve that kind of underpants like regiion seriously. Also your but should have way smoother separation. Basically even there your painted areas a are way lower then what tey should be.

But thenagain your vertex loopsdont do you any favors. Please note a real human does crease. Once youve fixed that THEN start using influence objects to keep the shapes.then do corrections.