Maximum bone influence for rigging a current gen game character?

kunglao

Hi Guys,
Wondering what is the maximum (often used) bone influence when rigging a current gen game character?

I recall working at a mobile game studio couple of years back that we used 2-3, this was for 1000-1500 tri models that had a pretty lo bone rig.
I have finished a personal character 16,000 tri and rigging him now purely to pose not animate but going forward feel it would be good practice to work with what is generally considered the norm.

Thanks.

Mark Dygert

I think Unreal, CryENGINE and unity cap out at 4, I personally don't see a reason to go above that, except maybe in the face but even then you can get by with 4 bone influences just fine. 5 seems like overkill and I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where you would need 5 bones to influence 1 vert? Other than possibly laziness and not wanting to worry about the number of influences...

I guess there are some rigging techniques that blend the vert weights between various bones, so you can have a set of verts weighted to 2 different bone chains and blend the weights between them. But typically people weight the final mesh to a final game ready skeleton and then blend that skeleton between different weights.

If it's for posing you can always use however many you want and then clone/collapse the stack once its posed then import it as a static mesh?

kunglao

Great, thanks for the reply Mark