8

Skin Wrap Modifier 813
Threshold—
Determinesthedistanceinsystem
units that the softw are uses to find the closest
face to a control vertex. The greater the distances
by which the control object’s and base object’s
surfaces deviate, the higher the Threshold value
needs to be. Default=5.0.
Note: Threshold is recomputed only when you add
abasemeshorclickReset.
Wa rni ng: B e careful about increasing this setting.
High values can result in excessive computation times,
especially with complex base objects.
Weight A ll Poi nts —
Forces all base-object points
to hav e weights. Each weight is calculated from a
combination of three factors: control vertex scale,
control vertex strength, and base-object point
position.
Bydefault,notallbase-objectpointsare
necessarily influenced by the control object.
Turning on Weight All Vert ices causes all points to
be influenced by one or more control vertices. If a
large number of base-object points are unassigned,
this can take a long time to calculate.
Co nvert To Skin—Applies a new Skin modifier
(page 1–781)
tothebaseobjectthatreplicatesthe
animation in the Skin Wrap modifier. Using this
function requires that a Skin modifier already be
applied to each control object.
Basically, Convert To Skin intelligently “bakes” the
animation from skinned low-res control objects to
thehigh-resbaseobject.TheSkinmodifierthatit
createscontainsalltheboneassignmentsfromthe
original Skin modifier, but with completely rebuilt
weight settings based on the base-object weights
created by the Sk in Wrap modifier.
This function is useful in game-development
settings where the game engine recognizes the Sk in
modifier sett ings but not the Skin Wrap modifier.
Advanced Parameters rollout
The Mirror tools in Skin Wrap let you apply
local settings (Strength and Scale) from control
vertices on one side of a control object to the other,
mirroring them across a plane aligned with the X,
Y, or Z axis. This is useful for setting up character
meshes.
Note: Mirror copies only Skin Wrap settings from
control vertices; it doesn’t copy animation data.
Thus,whenusingSkinWrapwithacharacter
model, first make local settings for control vertices
on one side of the control object, select the vertices
to copy, mirror them, and then animate the control
object.
The Bake/Retrieve Control Vertices f unctions let
you store control-vertex settings into the base
object and then retrieve them. This is useful for
sharing data among artists working on the same
project.
Show Mir ror Data—Turns on display of the mirror
plane gizmo as well as a small circle showing the
projected location for each selected control vertex.
Move the gizmo and the projected locations with
the Mirror Offset control (see following).