Saving skin weights

[ellyfish]

Hi, I'm pretty new to MEL and what I'd like to do is be able to export a file with the skin weights of all the vertices on my model to read in from another application I'm writing. The export skin weights tool saves them as an image based on the UVs, which is less than ideal for my purposes. It would be better if I could just run something that would make a file that lists the vertices in vertex order with their associated weights. Is that possible?

[joojaa]

I would use python for file related things but sure no problem heres some very quick and dirty code (select all objects object to be exported):

{
 $fileName = (`internalVar -userTmpDir` + "example2.skin");
 $fileId=`fopen $fileName "w"`;
 for ($item in `ls -sl`){
    $skin = findRelatedSkinCluster($item);
    // windows style endings
    fprint $fileId ("weights for cluster " + $skin +":\r\n");
 
    for ($vert in `ls -fl ($item + ".vtx[ * ]")`){
        float $weights[] = (`skinPercent -query -value skinCluster1 $vert`);
        for ($weight in $weights){
            fprint $fileId ($weight  + "\t");
        }
        fprint $fileId ("\r\n");
    }
 }
 fclose $fileId; 
}

You could be much faster and elegant with maya api and python.

[ellyfish]

I can worry about elegance later, right now the most important part is to get this other program to work. And this script works fantastically for that purpose!  Thanks!