Moving joints after skin bind?

[z00lander]

Ive just smooth skinned my character and have spent a fair while painting up the weights etc.
Now ive just seen that a joint is placed wrong and I dont know how to move it without affecting my skin, is there a way to just move the joint or do I have to redo it.
Thanks

[jason-howey]

the only way I can think to do this is to goto editSmoothBind > export skin weight maps
export for all the joints.
then detach your skin, mess with the joint as needed, then reskin your geometry and import the weight maps.

the only problem with this is it doesn't save the weight maps per vertex, instead it saves it as a rastered image. this can give you small deviations when you reimport. so make sure the maps have a large resolution
hope that helps
Jason

[badcookie]

also, if its a poly character make sure that you have no overlapping UVs before you export your weight map.

[mantrid]

If you weighted the skin with a rigid bind you can temporarily detach the skin without loosing the weighting, which will reapply when you re-attatch the skin.

[gnimmel]

You can disable the weights on a smooth bind too, not just a rigid.
Detach skin with keep history selected and all your skin cluster nodes and weights will be kept on the joints. You can now move your joints to the new location and re-bind. At this point you will get an error saying you need to be in bind pose, but simply delete your bind pose and re-bind.
There is a way to reset the bind pose, but I'm not in front of maya at the moment and can't remember the command. In your case deleting it should work fine.

Richard