I’m frequently encountering two bugs in Maya 2010 and 2009.

The first is quite often Maya will not allow me to paint blend shape weights when clearly the model has a blendShape node input. (The icon for painting has a cross through it). After restarting Maya and reloading the scene, it works, but then can revert and not work again later.

Secondly, I have found the relax mode of artisan paint will not affect some vertices of my mesh, as if they are locked in position. The smooth, push, pull modes work absoloutely fine. I have no workaround for this and its severly limiting my workflow.

Can anyone offer any more information on these issues ?

Ben

you could run this when the blendshape paint fails (taken from artAttrBlendShapeToolScript.mel ) it might give you a clue.

string $cmd = “artAttrCtx -q -attrSelected “ + `currentCtx` ;
string $attrSelected = eval($cmd)
string $target[];
$target = `textScrollList -q -si blendShapeTargetList`; // tells you what is selected in the target list;
string $tokens[] ;
tokenize( $attrSelected, “.”, $tokens)
int $result = getIndexForBlendShapeTarget($target[0],$tokens[1])
print ($target[0] + “\t” + $tokens[1] + “\t” + $result + “\n")

With regards to the second issue you raise, relax does not work on edges that lie on border edges, but push, pull and smooth do. Perhaps you have border edges where you do not expect them?

No, its a continous mesh, normals facing corrected way, vertices welded, all quads. Only other thing I can think is winding order of the polygons ?

Thanks for the first script BTW !

Heres the output

// Error: file: /opt/aw/maya2009/scripts/others/bsTargetIndex.mel line 56: No object matches that name.  Cannot query. //
-1

That means that this fails: string $aliasNames[] = `aliasAttr -q $blendShape`; This gets the user friendly names for the weights that you see in the blendShape editor. They are normally derived from the transform names of the targets and could be very long or thus problematic.

Try
aliasAttr -q $tokens[1];

It looks like somehow the alias names for the weights get messed up. What do you see in the Blend Shape Editor?

I have also come across this issue. I think it’s caused by a mixture of skin weights, clusters and blenshapes on the same mesh. I think as soon as you paint cluster weights on your mesh, your blendshapes paint weight tool no longer functions correctly.