3ds max rigging question

iller3

...I'm having a great time with this program and especially this release (2009), but I have a newb'ish question on workflow: (...this is obviously my first real attempt at any kind of complex Biped Model so pardon my ignorance plz ... I have trouble reading manuals and only learn well with Hands-On work)
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Right now I'm sticking to the very-very basics based on Source Model Data.... editable mesh, manip'ing vertexes mostly 1 at a time, skin+envelope & frame by frame anims ___ nothing fancy. I just want to know if there's an easy much faster way for me to quickly jump back and forth between the Editable Mesh & the manual Vertex weighting in Skin without having to collapse the layer stack and re-import the Vertex weights every time?

monster

I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If you are only moving vertices, and not adding or deleting vertices, you can simply click on Editable Mesh below the skin modifier and edit away. It's fine to ignore the warning that pops up. In a typical art pipeline, the model if finalized before the Skin weights are attempted.

However, if you are adding or deleting vertices, there really is no faster way. The Skin modifier relies on vertex order. Adding or deleting vertices changes the order.

Not to be rude, because I honestly had trouble interpreting your post, if you used typical sentence structure and punctuation it would make it easier for us to understand the problem.

iller3

No that's definitely what I needed to know.... that the Skin Modifier is dependent on vertex count/order ...really explains why it kept doing such weird things too, Vert's getting weighted to envelopes on the opposite end of the model, and all that. Thanks a lot!

I hope they find a way to make it quicker some day so I don't have to keep writing all these scripts :P

Mark Dygert

Well typically (like monster said) the model's vert count and topology is not going to be changing once its passed onto the animation team. It does happen from time to time and there are some things you can do to get skin weights converted over but typically it means there has been a breakdown in the pipeline. Very rarely do people model while also trying to skin...

If you do need to change your mesh. You can copy it, make your changes then apply the "SkinWrap" modifier and target the original mesh (that still has skin applied). It will look for verts roughly in the same spot and follow them if it can, then you can convert SkinWrap to Skin and delete your old mesh.

iller3

Thanks, I'll give that a trying-out!

The reason I'm having to keep it skinned with animation poses --> and then do more Translating while adding more Vertices: is because there's lots and lots of little folds in some places that I have to try and un-bunch, and then lots of large polygon faces on other places that just make curves on the body look all jaddegy at certain angles. So basically, I have to keep shifting limb positions around to eliminate any self-clipping and overly jagged edges at the extremes of limb angles.

There's probably something really simple that I'm still missing here (some way to integrate the vertice weights directly into the Mesh Editing maybe?) b/c I'm so new to the whole process.

Mark Dygert

Not really... Because the skin weights are assigned to the verts by their numbering anytime you change that numbering it will mess up skin. You're envisioning a much more fluid system than has ever been built into any 3D app. You pretty much get a really good sense of how meshes will be skinned and deform and almost always pass along finished models that are ready to go to work.

Trying to figure out topology, joint placement and skinning can be pretty hard if you're doing it through trial and error but the more you do it, you find there are common ways to handle most things.

Fingers, elbows and knees all bend on one axis so they can have similar topology, depending on the specs of the game and its priorities.

Shoulders, hips and wrists tend to be problem areas but there are various ways to deal with them. Twist bones in the wrists help with the candy wrapper effect, sometimes helper bones in the shoulders and hips help things deform properly but that depends on how the model is structured. But a lot of those things depend on what the game will allow you to do, how many bones you can have, how many bones can influence a single vert, how well the engine handles IK or if FK needs to be baked to IK before exporting. Through it all there are some pretty common techniques but the specifics of what you can do often depend on the engine, the game and the programers priorities.

http://www.hippydrome.com/Sketches.html
Will help you with topology, joint placement and even skin weighting so it's a good site to check out when you're stuck.

poopipe

the "fluid" solution is to skinwrap a duplicate of the original mesh to a working skinned version and make edits to that (the skinwrapped one)

when you're done a simple convert to skin plus some cleanup is all that's needed to make things right.

fwiw I started rigging my characters before they were finished a long time ago in order to ensure that my topology was legit and deformed well.