#57 Maya mesh export hard crash, easy to reproduce
Summary: when you export a mesh that has verticies that
are weighted to bones that are not present in the .xsf
file, Maya will hard crash once you click next past the
bone limit stage.
It is common in Maya when using Smooth Skinning that
terminating bones (finger tips) will have some small
weight assigned to them. We usually don't want to
export this data, so we don't include these bones in
the .xsf export. But if you don't remove all weighting
to these bones, the exporter will hard crash Maya (just
poof, gone).
Solution one: instruct users to manually use the
Componenet Editor to set weights to zero for all of the
bones not included in the .xsf file. Bonus points for
providing a script that will look at the mesh, then the
.xsf file, and set all "invalid" bones to not reference
any verts (set all vertex weights to zero for those bones).
Solution two: automatically filter out these bones,
assigning their weights to the direct parent until a
legal bone is found. Bonus points for providing an
option to "fix" the mesh weighting for the user, or let
it remain the same and only be adjusted for the actual
export.
I can provide sample files if you like, but it's quite
easy to reproduce in a test case, all you have to do is
make an .xsf with only half the bones or something, and
have a mesh attached using Smooth Skinning.
-James
uberartist@gmail.com