A flood of problems at work have kept me busy during the day. I'm on after-hours monitor duty, which surprisingly went fine right until the last day, but ate away at my concentration. Then everything fell apart and I spent most of the next day dealing with it. Bleh.

Work on the model didn't go a whole lot better. I spent a heap of time of time over the weekend trying to work out the details for my idea to end wire weight painting. Initial efforts were very successful. I was able to get a handle on how to use PyMel to navigate the mesh and its vertices. Then I started on figuring out how to get the weights and the vertices they are applied to.

That did not go as well.

I was able to get the vertices, I was able to get the weights, but I was confounded by trying to figure out how to determine which weights applied to which vertices. I gave up and asked a forum for help. The thread got a lot of views, but no answers, unfortunately. So, after the after-hours work today, I continued to try. Nothing. Then just at the end of it, I happen to come across a piece of documentation that details a capability to export deformer weights to xml. Importing them can be done by vertex id, nearest vertex, and something called over. All things I wanted and more and done better than I could have. All on a menu I never use because it's on another view that I don't look at often.

The lesson? I really need to read the manual more.