[3Ds Max] Is rigging and skinning before texturing ok?

Danzigo

Hi guys,

I'm wanting to rig and skin my character I've modelled so I can create some poses and a walk cycle. Is this ok to do before the uv mapping? Or will the uv mapping and texturing mess up the skinning and rig or something?

Just want to check before I proceed any further.

Thanks alot

antweiler

I cant speak for Max, but in Maya you can easily replace your skinned untextured mesh with the textured one later by binding it and copying the skinweights from one mesh to another. Im sure you can do that in Max either. Generally in games pipielines, there should be as few linear dependencies (as you described) as possible.

Mrfred

no it wont, however having a basic UV ing can help too see weird deformation, otherwise you will have to rely on the wireframe or edges deformations. You can move the UV under the skin modifier and collapse it later on as well
hope it answer your question

ps: we often do it in production for testing purpose if we want to quickly test a specific geometry

.Wiki

antweiler wrote: »

Generally in games pipielines, there should be as few linear dependencies (as you described) as possible.

Not only in games, also for movies. But then you usally use a layout mesh to animate as early as possible.

For a recent unity project I had to create 1 Character, Vehicle and Building which needed to be animated. I created my rig first after the models had good proportions and gave them to the animator. Then while the animator created the blockout animation I was able to clean up the meshes and create UVs and textures. And in the end the animation was just refined.

I´m working with softimage but this workflow should be also possible with 3dsmax.

Mark Dygert

Sure you can do that, you can even change the topology or add/remove geometry if you really need to.

If you don't change the geometry and the vert numbering matches (it can change if you import/export the mesh to other apps) you can just apply UVW unwrap under the skin modifier, then load/save the UV's. Use the "collapse to" command (right click the modifier list) to preserve the skin but save the UV's into the mesh. Avoiding long complicated modifier stacks under the skin modifier helps it be as fast as possible.

If you change the geometry you should do it to a copy of your old mesh. Then to transfer the skin weights, apply the skinwrap modifier to your new mesh, target the old mesh (that is still skinned to bones and has a pose that matches). Then use the "convert to skin" feature inside of skinwrap and collapse the stack as necessary, you can then delete the old mesh.

Skinwrap is based on vertex or face position in world space and doesn't need the vert numbers to match, but it does need a vert roughly in the same world space as the target mesh for it to copy accurately.

While skinwrap is still applied you should animate your mesh through some basic poses to check and see how accurately the skinwrap is copying the weights, you might need to adjust the settings to get a tighter wrap before converting to skin and collapsing.

Danzigo

Ok great, thanks alot guys.

So if I rig and skin first and don't change any of the topology, I'll just uvw unwrap under the skin modifier.

Thanks again

Mark Dygert

Yep you can do it above too and drag it under if you want pose the mesh and unwrap it in a way that helps with deformation, like bending knees and elbows and unwrapping while they are stretched. Typically you don't want to go full extreme because it will compact and squash pixels, but half way helps.

Also You can push and pull the existing topology around all you want and the skin weights will stay intact. So if you have some loops that are really tight and need to be spread out a bit, you can do that, just don't weld or attach meshes. Use skinwrap instead on a copy.

Also if you have a base mesh with a really good set of skin weights you can skinwrap any mesh to it and copy the skin weights to get a really good place to start from. That is if your base and rig can be deformed to closely match your new mesh, which depends on how flexible your rig is.

thomasp

IMO you can just skip keeping your original meshes intact and rely on skinwrap to get the job done these days.

no need for a linear way of working at all unless blendshapes/morph targets are involved. and even then, skinwrap can save your day.

manjil47

i accidentally skinned before unwrap
so i just exported the skin from advanced parameters `Save` button on frame 0 then collapsed the uvwrap and all modifiers
after that just apply skin modifier again when texture is done add bones and import the saved skin from 'load'
match by name if no bones changes made then hit ok and its working

PS: just posting this incase someone did the same mistake is mine.

gandhics

Turn off skin and try this.
http://cganimator.com/mcg-reordervertsbyproximity/