Hold smooth skin weights

When you edit or paint weights of smooth skin objects, you sometimes want to ensure that the weights of certain objects won’t change. For example, if you’ve perfected the weighting of a particular object, you might want to make sure that its weights do not change due to the Normalize Weights mode you have enabled. To preserve those weights as you work, you can turn on Hold in the Paint Skin Weights Tool or Component Editor. When Hold is on, Maya keeps those weights at their current values as you modify the weights of other influence objects. You can still modify the weights for those objects by entering new values in the Component Editor.

To hold weights using the Paint Skin Weights Tool

Select the influence with weights you want to hold in the Influences list, then click the Lock icon just below the Influences list. (See also Hold and Un-hold Influence weights.)
A lock icon displays next to the influence name as long as its weight values are on hold.

NoteIf you hold the weights of many objects at the same time, Maya may be unable to normalize the rest of the weights properly, which can result in an error message. In general, avoid locking the weights of many objects at the same time. Typically, you want to lock the weights of only one or two objects. If you don’t want to unlock the weights of any of the objects, you can turn off weight normalization (see Smooth skin weight normalization).

When you directly edit influence object weights in the Component Editor, you can quickly specify whether the weights of particular joints or smooth skin influence objects can change. (Under the Smooth Skins tab, note the Hold row.) For each joint or smooth skin influence object, the value for Hold corresponds to the Hold Weights setting under the Smooth Skin Parameters heading in the Attribute Editor.