I am following some advice I received on this forum after trying to apply facial rigging to a model that has already been rigged by a script. In Maya, I separated the head from body meshes, applied the rigging script to the body, and am attempting to copy in the head and re-combine it.

The catch is that my original model was rigged by someone else, and the facial joints were bound to the mesh while the entire body was a part of the mesh. Now, even after I delete the original body mesh, I cannot move or rotate the head without huge fragments of the original, deleted, body mesh re-appearing. I suspect this has something to do with the history, or the head joints having some remote binding attachment to vertices along the body mesh, etc.

So now, when I try to import the old head into the new body rig, it brings with it "baggage," and when rotating the head, large fragments of the old body mesh appear, and rotate along with it. I uploaded a screencap, hopefully it will be attached here... The body is supposed to be in a forward T-pose, while only the head is supposed to be turned, but you can see the result.

Any idea why this is happening? Any idea on how to fix it? I would really appreciate any good advice. TYIA!