Skin weight maps maya4

[katha]

hi everybody
my problem is :
i have a character who is completely binded and skinned, i changed the mesh and forgot to disable the history. the computer became very slow.when i remove the history the skin will be detached from the bones and the painting of the skinweights is lost. i tried to export the skinweights, but the export/import doesn`t work properly. is there another possibility to keep the skinweights of the old mesh, delete the history and transfer the old skinweights to the new mesh?
thanks in advance

[autumn]

ok, save out your current scene. Now do whatever history deleting you think you need to do to your mesh. Now, rebind the mesh to the skeleton. Now, import the old scene file (the one with the skinned mesh) into this scene. Select the old version of the skinned mesh, shift-select the new skin and go Animation>Skin>Edit Smooth Skin>Copy Skin Weights. This should copy the weightings over to your new mesh so you can delete all of the stuff you imported into the scene and off you go!

What sort of errors were you getting when you tried to export the skin weights before btw. Note, that to export and import weight maps the surfaces have to be UV'd. So try applying automatic mapping to the object to give it uv data (if it hasn't already got any), then try and export the skin weight maps.

Hope this helps you out.

TomB

[twedzel]

skin weight maps are UV dependant, you cannot use the copy/paste skin weight maps if you have any overlapping UV's on the geometry you are rigging.