Copy smooth skin weights

The tools for copying skin weights give you two levels of control in the skin weight editing workflow. You can copy and paste all weights from one bound mesh to another (for example from a low res mesh to a high res mesh), or for even finer control, you can copy the weight value of a single vertex and paste it to other vertices.

Copy weights from one vertex

You can select a vertex and copy its weight value to other selected vertices. You can paste these weights to vertices that are on the same mesh, or paste to vertices on a separate mesh.

To copy and paste skin point weight values

In the Paint Skin Weights Tool, switch to Select or Paint Select mode.
Select a vertex whose weight value you want to copy, then click the Copy tool icon .
Select the vertices where you want to paste the value and click the Paste tool icon .
The weight value you copied is pasted to all selected vertices.

Note
If you are pasting weight values from one mesh to another, Maya displays an error if the target mesh is missing any influences that have weights to the source vertex.

You can also use the following hotkeys to copy and paste weights from vertex to vertex:

(Windows) ++c and ++v
(Mac OS X) ++c and ++v

Copy all weights

For best results when copying smooth skin weights from one bound skin to another, your source and destination skin should:

be positioned closely together in your scene. For example, the skinned meshes you are copying weights to and from should be located at the same position in Maya’s coordinate space.
look similar. For example, copying the smooth skin weights from one medium sized biped model to another produces much better results than copying smooth skin weights from a small biped model to a large biped model.

To copy all smooth skin weights from one bound mesh to another

Do one of the following:
- Select the smooth skin polygonal mesh (or group of meshes) you want as the source skin, and then select the polygonal mesh (or group of meshes) you want as the destination skin.
- Select the vertices you want as the ‘source’, then select the vertices you want as the ‘target’.
Select Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Copy Skin Weights > .
Do the following:
- Set the Surface Association options appropriately based on the type of correlation you want to occur. For most situations, the default setting of Closest point on surface works best. If your characters differ widely in scale or proportion you may wish to use the UV space setting.
- Set the Influence Association options appropriately based on what you believe will provide the best correlation between the joints. For most situations, the default setting of Closest joint works best. If the skeleton hierarchies in your scene are identical, the One to one setting can be useful.
Do one of the following:
- Click Copy to copy the smooth skin weights from the source skin to the destination skin.
- Click Apply to copy the smooth skin weights from the source skin to the destination skin.
- Click Close to close the options window without copying the skin weights.