Transfer a skinned mesh to another skeleton?

[seith]

Hello, I have a polygon mesh that's bound to a skeleton, and I need to actually bind it to another similar (but not identical) skeleton. Is there any way for me to somehow re-assign the mesh to the other skeleton without losing the work I put in weighting the mesh the first time? Thanks!

[ldunham1]

the simplist way I can think of is:
you can export the skinWeights for a skinCluster, detach the mesh from the skinCluster, re-bind the new joints and import the exported skinWeights (this is providing that the new joints are named identically the old which themselves have either been deleted or renamed).
if joints are not named correctly (I suggest they should be then rename after re-importing the weights) or you wanted to edit the assignment of particular weights, exporting the skinWeights creates a folder of separate weight map image files for each joint as well as a data file to assign the joint to its map.
That file is directly editable in a text editor, so you can change and rename items in there if you need to.

[seith]

Thanks for your suggestion Idunham1. The problem is that the new skeleton doesn't have the same number of joints, nor the same names.

So I ended up re-weighting the skin to the new skeleton. But I wish there were a tool to automatize this process. Something that would look at the bounding boxes of the old joints, define which new joints match them best, then re-apply the weights based on world-space vertex coordinates.

I mean Maya has a way to replace a skinned geometry, and it should also have a way to replace the skeleton of a skinned geometry...