I'm trying to assign the skin weights to a model from textures.

The model and rig was originally setup in Maya, but I'm transferring the scene over to Houdini; trying to take advantage of Houdini's file referencing.

The model is coming in through a file node and it's dynamic, therefore the skin weights have to be dynamic. I want to be able to assign a weight map (single channel texture) per bone to control weighting, so I can dynamically swap the textures and the model.

Any help would be appreciated, or other ideas to accomplish the same goal. Thanks.

Have you tried FBX to get the character over with full weights? Is that not flexible enough for what you want to do?

I've been testing by importing in an fbx, but I would need to switch which fbx is “imported” on the fly (driven by an xml file changing on disk, possibly while the scene is open). The file node won't keep the weight information when I pipe in an fbx. Will another node type work better?