Importing / Exporting Weight Maps

As well as backing scene files up to CD's, I have been exporting the weights after every time I touched them.

Its easy to do and hopefully this will help me if anything goes wrong.

Exporting:
Once your object has been UV mapped, With the Skin selected, simply go to Skin -> Edit Smooth Skin -> Export Skin Weight Maps. You can then choose the format of the map images and the resolution etc. I have been using the default values.



It then saves an UV image per bone with the weight maps painted on in black and white, for example, SkinName_BoneName.jpg. By doing this, you can also clearly tell what bits of the mesh need sorting out.

Example:



Importing:
Select the mesh skin you want to use, making sure it is bound to the same skeleton hierarchy as your exported skin weights and the skeleton is in the default bind pose. tThen go to Skin -> Edit Smooth Skin -> Import Skin Weight Maps. Select the file you want to import and voilà... sorted.