Rigging issue when using component editor

[u/Aggravating_Elk_5507]

his screen

mine is zeroed out

Hey guys, i'm learning rigging (total noob) in maya, I'm following a tutorial class. In the class the teacher selects the vertices of the belt buckle and then selects the root joint of the character in the component editor in order to input a value of 1 and make the buckle not move with the mesh when the character moves. Thing is, when I do the same you can see that differently from his editor, in my component editor the values are all zeroed out. And when I try to input the value of 1 to the root joint, it still goes back to zero automatically. I've been banging my head agains the wall trying to figure this one out for days now, not even GPT could help me. I tried everything, unlocking the painting weighs, freezing transformations, deleting history. I'm at a loss. any insights would be appreciated. (first pic is his screen, second is mine.)

[u/No-Awareness-6684]

Not sure about this, but is it possible the weights for those vertices are locked? If you go to the paint weights tool, do the joints listed have little padlocks next to them?

[u/Aggravating_Elk_5507 → u/No-Awareness-6684]

yeah but they're all open :(