Lock weights in 3ds max

Jonas Ronnegard

Hi my Japanese workmates has recently found out I'm good at solving problems they have been having
with programs etc, mostly because i can search for these problems in english while they can't

so here is another one, I have never really used the weight tools in 3dsmax so I won't be able to explain the problem very well, instead I found a post with what seems to be the same problem,
I'll post it here and hopefully you have an answer for this or use a workflow to go around this.

"Going through the skinning tools i didn't find anything similar to HOLD WEIGHTS in maya.........in max..and i dont think its there with max........
Is there anyway to hold weights in 3ds max so that i can keep the weights undisturbed for a particular bone...while skinning ....or any script that does these....otherwise will be a big pain to skin a vertex shared by 3 to 4 bones....
Or shall i change the way of Skinning characters with max......
Hoping for some positive"

monster

There are a couple of things you can do. With the vertices selected open the weight table. Set the bottom left dropdown to Selected Vertices. Turn on the Show Global option. Then click on the M checkbox in the top (Global) row. M stands for Manual. If you edit envelopes any vertex marked manual will keep its current weights and no longer be influenced by envelopes. If you're familiar with maxscript you can just type this command into the listener, instead of fudging around in the weight table.

skinOps.bakeSelectedVerts $.skin

The second thing, in case that's not what you wanted, you can hide vertices and polygons in edit poly mode and they will be unselectable when you return to the skin modifier. This is very handy when skinning a character with a lot of gear.

spacefrog

There is even a button called "Bake Selected" ( the little oven bakes the selected vertices ). In the same button row are tools to completly exclude vertices from specific bones

Another thing that might help are named selections:
select your vertices and type a name in the Named Selection field.

cw

I think OP might be referring to the problem when working on 3/4 bone influenced verts where you get into a juggling situation when tweaking. Usually resolves into using the weight table or setting the weights in a specific order which avoids the problem.

Imagine you give 1.0 to left leg, then 0.5 to hips, then you want the leftleg which is now at 0.5 to be shared between leftleg and rightleg -- you will have to use weight table to do it cleanly (or restart), because using the bone tools mean that as you add the influence to rightleg it will strip it from hips and left leg.

What you might want to do is tick the hips bone as locked, and then any changes to the weight of leftleg gets redistributed to rightleg but hips is always kept at its locked value.

Let me know if this is the same issue OP? I have been asked about this a few times and I was considering trying to make a solution.

Jonas Ronnegard

Hi and thanks for the help, My coworker wanted to try and explain his problem better
so he sent me an image that hopefully can clarify his problem better.

monster

I see, it's what CW was describing. There is no built in way to do that.