Maya combine skinned mesh

Hello,

I made a soldier for my game and i rigged him, I also have a seperate gun model for him and i want to combine the gun model with the soldier but when i press the combine button, my weightpaint tool stops working(It doesn't show the colors anymore). Does anyone know how to combine these 2 meshes properly?

 

probably be able to find an answer on polycount forums.

 

only thing i can think of is that you combined the meshes after binding the meshes, although I have trouble undersanding why you would want the soldier and the gun to be combined into one mesh? Wouldn't that cause some rigging/weighting issues?

 

@Jelle_Booij Your desire to combine the weapon into the soldier's skin data is not the common workflow for setting up a character who has multiple weapons.
You can have the weapon rigged to the characters hand, even if you have multiple weapons, as long as the weapons are separate mesh objects, and hide/unhide the weapons at run time to fake the look of the character switching weapons.

But a more common workflow is to parent the weapon to the right hand in the animation package for reference purposes only. Create the animations with the left hand being IK bound to the weapon when needed and IK un-bound when not performing two handed animations. Complete all animations, then un-parent the weapon and export the character with animations, without the weapon. Export the weapon as as separate mesh model - no animations. The animations you created for the character will drive the position/rotation of the weapon in Unity.
In Unity set up the character as needed, and orient and parent the weapon to the characters right hand.
This is a better / more versatile process than skinning the weapon to the character, which limits the follow on edit-ability of the character, to change weapons, change pose and posture, and being re-purposed for other applications.

Just a friendly heads up about workflow. Hope this is helpful.

 

Thanks for the reply's

I fixed the problem(No idea how). I am making an rts game and every unit will have a seperate model. I am making the game with a friend and i think that its better when he can just apply 1 material.

 

Parenting weapons to hands instead of adding them to the skin will make your life a *lot* easier, as you can make alterations to them (and add new ones) without touching the character model and rig. It's also better for performance, as the CPU only has to calculate the position of the weapon's transform (versus all it's vertices).

Note that using 1 material doesn't require a single skin or object . You can apply the same material to your character and all the interchangeable weapons...this is actually a good practice.