Low to high poly mesh skin weights

[charles-fernandez]

Hi everybody. I started by creating a very low poly human body mesh. I referenced that mesh into a new scene where I rigged and weighted it. I've also taken that same mesh into Mudbox and created a much higher quality model. I had been operating under the impression that I could relativley easily swap out the low rez mesh for the high res mesh by redirecting the reference. Turns out, that didn't work so well, and I'm looking for alternatives. Is there a way I can easily take the weights from the low res mesh, and apply them to the high rez version?

[nowayfra]

The skin weights are stored inside the skinCluster node on a per vertex base, so retargeting the reference to a mesh with different topology cant work. For a good result you surely will have to repaint the weights, but there are some tools to speed up this process. So for a good start you could 1. export the low poly skin weights UV based into bitmaps and apply them to your hires mesh (both need same UV layout of course) or 2. copy skin weights.

[charles-fernandez]

Thank you very much. I had tried copy skin wieghts last night, but I wasn't entirely sure how it worked because I'd never actually used it before, and it didn't work. After your suggestion though, I watched a quick tutorial to make sure I was using it properly, resest it to default, and it worked perfectly.