Physique and Skin won't work -- help!

Abby3D

I'm hoping someone here can solve this, or maybe I'll have an epiphany tomorrow. But this problem has me stumped.

I have a character (editable mesh) and a biped skeleton (in figure mode, fitted to the character). When I select the character and put a Physique or Skin modifier on it, I don't see any bone links for me to attach the vertexes to. The biped remains in block form, without the familiar yellow lines that signify bones.

I've been using 3D for ten years, and I've never encountered this problem before. The version I'm using is 3dsmax 9. I've tried restarting. I've tried a new biped skeleton. I've re-imported everything in the scene. I've hunted through the 3dsmax settings. I've looked through the help files and searched online. Got nothing.

Thanks for any help you can give with troubleshooting this problem!

SpeCter

You added the biped bones to your physique/skin modifier right?

If yes , did you enable "edit envelopes" ?

Eric Chadwick

http://download.autodesk.com/us/3dsmax/2012help/index.html?url=files/GUID-9596F6EF-3569-44F2-8D6C-6EB58C30BED-480.htm,topicNumber=d28e99920
Procedures, step 2: use the Select By Name dialog (default hotkey H) to choose the Biped bones.

Abby3D

Yes, did those things. The only thing I can guess at this point is that maybe a maxscript is conflicting with biped. Or there's an obscure setting somewhere that I accidentally unchecked.

I'm going to experiment with just making a sphere and a biped, and seeing if it works for those. I'll also open old files that have physiqued characters, and see if I can see their bone links. If so, I'll just re-merge everything in my scene into one of those old files, and chalk it up to an obscure setting.

If not ... I'll try deleting maxscripts. I can't believe this weird problem!

Eric Chadwick

Not sure what the problem is exactly. The biped low-poly meshes ARE the bones. Those are what you pick when you want to add bones to Skin or Physique.

You can change the way those bones are displayed, but they're still just bones.
http://download.autodesk.com/us/3dsmax/2012help/index.html?url=files/GUID-D6DBEAF4-1BD8-4731-8D32-A056FC7E558-1519.htm,topicNumber=d28e296768,hash=WSF742DAB041063133728B9B2112A1CE7292-7F4B
vs.

Abby3D

@Eric: I'm trying to Physique a character to those biped bones. Normally, when you physique a character, you pick the root node and initialize it. Then the biped bones turn into yellow lines. You select vertexes on the 3d character model and assign them to each "link," or yellow line, which represents a bone.

I'm not seeing those yellow lines. When I initialize the physique, and then select vertexes, there's nothing to attach them to. The biped is there, and visible, but it's not letting me select bones or attach verts to them.

Eric Chadwick

Can't really help you sorry, haven't used Physique in ages.

Mark Dygert

Put the physique modifier down and step away slowly. No one else needs to get hurt, be cool man be cool and just walk away from the physique.

On a serious note I read somewhere in the max help file that every time someone uses the physique modifier Autodesk tosses a bag of kittens off a bridge.

Ok seriously tho, use skin to bind meshes to bones, you are only asking for pain and misery. The only thing that Physique has is deformable envelopes which is far out-shadowed by all of the other tools in skin.

SpeCter

Abby3D wrote: »

@Eric: I'm trying to Physique a character to those biped bones. Normally, when you physique a character, you pick the root node and initialize it. Then the biped bones turn into yellow lines. You select vertexes on the 3d character model and assign them to each "link," or yellow line, which represents a bone.

I'm not seeing those yellow lines. When I initialize the physique, and then select vertexes, there's nothing to attach them to. The biped is there, and visible, but it's not letting me select bones or attach verts to them.

These yellow lines are called envelopes btw.

Abby3D

YAYYAAAYAYYAYAYAAAY!!! I finally figured it out. The problem was Props. When you create a biped, you can check "arms," and you can check "props." I had checked both, foolishly taking a risk and giving props a try for the first time. Apparently you should never check props, because they render the biped un-skinnable. Maybe 3dsmax fixed this in later versions. I hope so.

@ Mark: I had tried the skin modifier, although I'm more used to physique. That wasn't the problem.

@ SpeCter: Envelopes are ovaloid. The yellow lines I'm talking about are bone links. I found a screenshot online. And another one.

I keep hearing that skin is better than physique, but I'm not sure why. I actually don't use envelopes; my models are low poly enough so I can select vertices or groups of vertices, and weight them in groups.

SpeCter

The ovaloid is a representation of the envelopes influence, you have to pick the lines to get them or in other words, the envelopes are the influence representation for the bone links.

Mark Dygert

Abby3D wrote: »

@ Mark: I had tried the skin modifier, although I'm more used to physique. That wasn't the problem.

The problem is that Physique was included in max with biped (Character Studio) back in version 2-3 (they here a bundled plug-in before that) and it was never kept up to date while biped was updated with features like prop bones. Physique just hasn't kept up and has trouble understanding the changes.

Skin is better than physique because of all of the tools that have developed for it over the years while physique just sat there. Sticking with something that is far inferior because its familiar, is a crappy way to work, don't be so timid embrace new things, try them out and see they really are better.

I'll give you a break down of what I like about Skin over physique.

Skin doesn't need to understand the rig to characterize it properly. Whatever is added to the skin list gets treated like a bone. This is very helpful when your rigs start to get a bit more complex and physique can't understand them, like with prop bones.

If you like weighting verts by hand you will probably like the weight tool in skin.

• It allows you to grow and shrink selections, select rings and loops easily so you don't have to click on ever vert.
  • Select two verts in a ring, click ring, click grow a few times and you have a quick way to select different groups, like thighs, biceps, forearms, fingers ect...
• You can smooth out the weights over a selection with the blend button.
  • This helps iron out those rough weights without having to adjust the weights manually vert by painful vert. This can be a painted effect too, which is REALLY handy, even on low poly meshes.
• You can adjust weights up and down with the + - buttons as well as the predefined weight buttons at the top, these help quite a bit too, so you aren't always typing in weights or clicking - + all the time.
• You can copy/paste weights, which saves time from having to manually type in and balance weights, like on over lapping geometry.

Mirroring vert weights from one side to another.

• This is great because characters don't need to be perfectly symmetrical for it to work and you only need to assign half of the weights.
  • It takes a vert on one side of the mesh and checks the the opposite side for a vert roughly in the same place within a specified area around it. If it finds another vert, it assigns the weight, if not it flags it as red and you need to adjust it.
• This saves an INCREDIBLE amount of time in the hands, shoulders and arms.

Paint Weights is the single most awesome feature in Skin.

• The paint blend tool is great I use it all the time.
• Turn on paint weights and use the following commands to control the paint brush (which are the same as every other brush tool in max)
  • Brush Radius = Ctrl + Shift + Drag up/down
  • Brush Strength = Alt + Shift + Drag up/down
  • Hold Alt while painting to invert the brush (remove weights)
  • Check on "Paint Blend Weights" to paint blend the weights

Remove Zero Weights (found in advanced parameters)

• This is critical for games because even weights of 0 carry a memory footprint so you always want to clear the zero weights.
• Also because the blend tool will blend between all weights it pays to get rid of the zero weights.

Set the number of bone influences at any time.

• In Physique you get one shot at this, when you initialize the character. In skin you can dial this up and down, which is helpful if your character is going to different platforms that have different levels of bone influence per vert. Some higher end engines like UDK let you have 4 bone weights per vert, some lower end only allow 3, 2, or in some extreme cases 1. It's nice to be able to have a cinematic character that can easily be clamped to lower bone thresholds rather than having to re-physique the entire mesh again.

Joint, Bulge and Morph Angle Deformers

• I use these a lot in my day to day dealings but most games don't support these, but some do in various ways.
• These help correct geometry as it deforms.
  • As an arm/shoulder reaches a certain angle you can trigger a morph to help it look better.
  • As muscles contract you can trigger a bulge, like in a bicep.
• There are similar bulge features in Physique but they are very primitive and no where near as robust, helpful or as intuitive to use.

The one thing that Physique has that Skin doesn't, is deformable FFD style envelopes. That's it. Honestly that isn't that important, but for a while I did start off with Physique just for that feature and then I would convert it over to skin to use all of the other great tools.

So there you go that's my take on the skin modifier, there are more features that other people probably rave about but those are the ones I mostly use and would have a hard time giving up. Very few people in the industry even bother with physique and I wouldn't be surprised if it was removed in a future release of max.

poopipe

you missed out the blend button and always deform tickybox.

best things ever!!!

(i skin things a lot)

re the original question
have you disabled link display in he biped properties, that might do it

i can't remember much about physique, its been 6or7 years since i last used it