Skin Weight Normalization Checklist

Check total weight per vertex, unweighted vertices, vertices over the max influence count, locked or excluded joints, mirrored weight seams, and tiny stray weights. A vertex with 0.98 total may look fine in one viewport but shift after export if the engine renormalizes differently.

Many realtime projects define a maximum number of joint influences per vertex, such as four or eight depending on platform and shader. Treat these as project settings, not universal rules. Prune tiny influences before normalization so important joints keep the deformation they need.

Freeze the rig state used for skinning, paint or copy weights, prune insignificant weights, normalize unlocked influences, then test deformation poses. Avoid normalizing locked joints unintentionally; it can steal weight from carefully painted areas such as shoulders, fingers, lips, or cloth attachments.

Export and reimport the skeletal mesh, then compare bind pose, animation extremes, vertex count, and influence count. Engines may clamp, prune, or renormalize weights during import. The accepted result is the imported deformation, not only the DCC viewport.

A shoulder collapses only after engine import. The DCC file has several tiny clavicle and spine influences plus a vertex over the project influence limit. Prune tiny weights, normalize the remaining shoulder and upper-arm influences, then test raised-arm, forward-reach, and idle poses before re-exporting.

Related multilingual terms on this page are technical anchors, not one-to-one translations: Weight Normalization / Skinning / Rigging / Vertex Weight / Normalize Weights / 权重归一化 / ウェイト正規化. Keep local-language notes beside the English production term when writing DCC tasks.