Skin - need some pointers

Abby3D

I'm a long-time user of Physique, and I'm new to using the Skin modifier. I agree that painting the vertexes and blend makes things a lot easier! However, I'm facing a newbie frustration.

It forces you to use the transform tool, and sometimes I accidentally move an envelope instead of selecting a vertex. I'll just be happily working along ... and then all of a sudden, the entire mesh distorts as I edit a vertex. How can I prevent this? I've lost an hour of work.

This is specifically happening while I test it on animation. At one point, I zoomed out only to see that the mesh had moved outside the biped.

Maybe this is related ... what does "reset bones" do?

Noors

You can uncheck Envelopes under "Select" in the skin modifier.

I assume you have a mix of enveloppe influence and per vertex weight.
You can also "bake selected verts" so that enveloppes influence get baked into the vertices. So the weight is per vertex and an enveloppe itself has no longer influence at all : moving it will do nothing.

Mark Dygert

Abby3D wrote: »

what does "reset bones" do?

Taken from the 3dsmax help file: http://download.autodesk.com/us/3dsmax/2012help/files/GUID-9596F6EF-3569-44F2-8D6C-6EB58C30BED-480.htm

Reset Selected Verts Resets the weight of selected vertices to the envelope defaults. After manually changing vertex weight, use this to reset weights.

Reset Selected Bone Resets associated vertex weights back to the original weights calculated for the selected bone's envelope.

Reset All Bones Resets all vertex weights back to the original weights calculated for all bone's envelopes.

When you have your skeleton in the pose that you will bind the mesh to it, select all of the bones, hold alt and right click the viewport and choose "set skin pose". This will help the skin modifier understand the joints as they animate. If you are getting distortion you probably changed the skin pose (normally on frame 0) which changes the way that skin understands how it is bound to the bones.

More info about skin poses
http://download.autodesk.com/us/3dsmax/2012help/files/GUID-9F79F01E-6A81-4103-B415-B5E88BD279A-2516.htm

Also make sure that you are working in skin with Animation mode off.