Modiying an editable poly under a skin modifier in Max

hooblegooblin

I have a character with a shirt mesh over top, all skinned to the character's bones. I'd like to remove a few faces from the sleeves of the shirt without disrupting the skinning of the shirt to the character. Is there a way to achieve this?

When I go into editable poly mode it detaches the shirt from the bones, which is not desired in this circumstance.

Mark Dygert

Copy your mesh, make your edits then apply the skinwrap modifier, target the original mesh, animate it to see how close it matches, tweak the skinwrap settings as needed then "convert to skin". You can then get rid of the skin wrap modifier and the old mesh.

stevston89

You can do an edit poly over top and then drop it under the skin modifier. You should also look into skin utilities. Forget get what panel they are under but you can extract the skin data to a mesh and the important that data back. As long as the verts match up the skin data will transfer exactly ( the same number of verts isn't necessary just vert placement for the stuff you want skinned).

hooblegooblin

Thanks, I tried the first method and it works pretty well. Is there a way to adjust individual vertices for the skin wrap modifier? The shirt mesh almost aligns with the base mesh but a few verts are slightly off.

Mark Dygert

stevston89 wrote: »

You can do an edit poly over top and then drop it under the skin modifier. You should also look into skin utilities. Forget get what panel they are under but you can extract the skin data to a mesh and the important that data back. As long as the verts match up the skin data will transfer exactly ( the same number of verts isn't necessary just vert placement for the stuff you want skinned).

Careful with that... I'm not so sure its all accurate.

1st) Max evaluates everything from the bottom of the stack up. So the edit poly would be fine above skin but would mess everything up if you moved it below.

If the edits are small enough and only throw a few verts out of whack you might be ok and just have to do a little bit of clean up. The more edits you do the higher the chances are that it will go horribly wrong. If you merge two objects together or export and import a mesh the vert table will more than likely be rewritten from scratch and nothing is going to match.

2nd) Each vert is given a number and that numbering changes when you edit the geometry.

Saving the weights, saves the bone wieghts per vertex number, if the vert numbers get jumbled up. Vert one was in the toe, now its in the face. The weights will load by vertex number only so the face vert will now have weights for the toe.

This is why you want to skinwrap your new edited model to your old, because it goes off of the vertex position in relation to the source mesh, not numbering.

stevston89

@ Mark Dygert - I am not talking about saving the vert data I am talking about a specific tool that is under Skin Utilities on the utilities panel ( I learned it from Paul Neales rigging dvds). It works far better than skin wrapping when removing bits of the mesh or transferring mesh data to the same mesh the only thing is the all of the bone used have to be in the new skin modifier. I agree though dropping an edit poly underneath in the stack is not the cleanest way to go about things.

I really recommend at least trying either of my methods before writing them off.

Mark Dygert

OOoohhh skin utilities sure yea you can use that, I thought you where hinting at something inside the skin modifier itself which I could only think of Load/Save.

I only use Extract/Import Skin Data, if I have two separate characters with their own rigs, but they are similar. The bone mapping/matching can be a bit of a pain.

If its a new mesh going onto the same rig it came from, I just skinwrap it. Its roughly as accurate.

Bruno Afonseca

Mark Dygert wrote: »

OOoohhh skin utilities sure yea you can use that, I thought you where hinting at something inside the skin modifier itself which I could only think of Load/Save.

I only use Extract/Import Skin Data, if I have two separate characters with their own rigs, but they are similar. The bone mapping/matching can be a bit of a pain.

If its a new mesh going onto the same rig it came from, I just skinwrap it. Its roughly as accurate.

What Mark said. I usually get pretty precise results with 0.001 falloff and face deformation. Anyway, you can just convert the skin wrap to a skin modifier, delete the skinwrap and tweak it as you'd like.