Lock smooth skin weights

When editing or painting 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 don't want the weights to change due to the Normalize Weights mode you have enabled.

When locked, 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 directly editing influence weights in the Component Editor.

To lock weights using the Paint Skin Weights Tool

1. In the Paint Skin Weights Tool, do any of the following:
   • Click the Lock icon next to an influence.
   • Ctrl-click to select multiple influences, then -click and select Lock Selected.
   • Select only the influences you want to keep unlocked, click to invert the selection, then -click and select Lock Selected.
   NoteIf you lock 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).

To lock weights in the Component Editor

1. Select the vertices with influences you want to lock.
2. In the Component Editor (Window > General Editors > Component Editor), switch to the Smooth Skins tab.

   This tab displays each influence affecting the selected vertices in a column layout.

3. Edit cells in the Hold row for each influence to lock and unlock the influences as follows:
   • To lock: Enter 1 to set the Hold cell to 'on'.

     When you set the Hold cell to 'on', the influence also displays with a lock icon in the Paint Skin Weights Tool.

   • To unlock: Enter 0 to set the cell to 'off'.
4. NoteFor each joint or smooth skin influence object, the value for Hold also corresponds to the Hold Weights setting under the Smooth Skin Parameters heading in the Attribute Editor.

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