3dsmax Skin Mirror Problem (IMAGE)

olivierth

Hi,

I'm rigging a character and trying to mirror the skinning from the left bones to the right bones. It's not working for the legs.

What it ends up doing is binding the right vertices to the Left leg. If you look in the image, you'll see that the legs'envelopes are in red.

eks

The skin modifier mirror is somewhat buggy. Is the mesh reset xformed? It helps make it work. :P

Mark Dygert

I've had that problem before with CAT, but it was back in Max9 when CAT was a plug-in. I've never had it happen with biped.

I normally ended up cleaning the mesh, (Command panel > hierarchy tab > reset scale/transform). You can reapply symmetry and watch the vertex count (press 7) to see if it changes as you toggle it on/off (light bulb).

But the problem normally isn't with the mesh, sometimes it was CAT and I ended up deleting the limbs on one side and recreating them, even then it didn't always solve the problem, but sometimes it did.

I haven't run into the problem with newer versions of CAT since it was integrated into Max but then the characters I work on are very humanoid and very standardized.

Ruz

yeah rest xform is you friend and sometimes if you set the mirror threshold too high that can cause it to happen.
also scaling issue can cause problems ie your mesh is too big or small in the scene
but its more likely a reset xform thing
Lastly turn off always deform then turn it on again in 'non' fig mode, then go back to fig mode and then repeat the process.

Mark Dygert

Oh also don't change or animate the bones on the frame (normally 0) that you applied skin.

Don't forget to set the skin pose of the bones before applying the skin modifier. Before you apply skin to the mesh, highlight your bones, hold alt, right click and choose "set skin pose", then apply skin and add the bones. This will help mirror understand the basic skin pose better.

Any animation you do to check the deformation or whatever should be done after the frame that you applied skin. I normally set keys on all the bones at 0, then hold ctrl-alt-left click drag in the time line to push frame 0 out of the keyable area so the timeline starts on 1.

sergsse

So many years passed but the problem is still there. I can't get why Reset X-Form should help. Sounds similar to "Just remove your skinning and recreate your bone structure and hopefully this time bug won't appear". I had the same problem and here are a few steps I did to resolve it:

1. Check your bones names. "L" and "R" should be the only difference in their names. I know it shouldn't be matter but once I had this problem resolved doing this simple trick (you can believe me or not but Autodesk soft is not perfect)

2. Do the same for your IK controllers

3. Move your bones to exact opposite positions (Xright = -Xleft while Yright = Yleft and Zright = Zleft). To do this without breaking anything go to frame0; untick "Always Deform" checkbox in your Skin modifier properties; turn "Bone Edit Mode" if necessary (Animation -> Bone Tools) and move your bones. Don't forget to turn everything back when it is done

4. If that didn't helped you will need to delete and re-create problematic bones (only those ones you want to be mirrored) following rules [1-3], add them again to the bones list of your skin modifier and try mirror again. The good thing you don't have to reskin anything

Hope this gonna help

Alexmaniotis

Pretty late for a respond but I will drop it. For sure this is a huge bug. But after I face it countles times I found a way to solve it.
Drop a copy of the model/mesh in the scene > resetXform it > Skin Wrap it with the broken model, done.I made that many times to ensure that it wasn't a random fix and it always work. Hope it helps.

Silph21

Hi, 
It's also pretty late for a reply but i had the same issue and the resetXform>SkinWrap didn't work.
I was finally able to bypass the issue by using an old backup.
On the backup, the Bones were correctly mirrored (don't know why because they were exactly the same). So i exported the skeleton and reimported it in my buggy project, because the bones names were the same, it didn't created a copy of my skeleton but simply replaced it. At that moment i was finally able to use the mirror correctly. So for future works i'd suggest verifying the mirror mode before spending a lot of time on the skin, saving it as a backup and only then starting the skin.