Rigging char with multiple parts

rockbox

Howdy folks,

In 3ds max I have a character separated into parts ie. left hand,right hand, left foot,right foot, torso etc. I'm trying to skin it with BonesPro with the bone limit set to 4 but as a BonesPro limitation, I can't skin all the parts with eachother at the same time. I have to switch to each mesh and their separate modifier. I was wondering if I could combine all the parts, skin it, then separate the parts back out and keep the skin data. Is this possible or non-destructive?

Noors

Not familiar with BonesPro.
With the regular skin, you can combine everything, then after skinning, duplicate the object for each part, and remove the unwanted faces. This preserves the skin unlike a detach.
Google tells me BonesPro can be converted to regular skin so it shouldn't be a problem.

rockbox

but if I delete the faces, wouldn't that change the vertices that were connected to those faces? My goal is dismemberment. So I broke the character into all those parts for the purpose of bringing them into cryengine together with the ability to detach them in-game. I was reading on this and I'm not sure if this is the optimal solution. If there's a more standard way of doing this without having seperate meshes but as long as it's one mesh with unwelded vertices, then that would be fine too.

rockbox

or I guess the best question to ask would be can I dismember a character if in 3ds max it is all attached as one object, but where the body parts join together they are not welded? Does that make sense?

rockbox

anybody?

throttlekitty

I don't know anything about CryEngine, but typically you can assign different materials to the faces of your model, which get imported as separate objects or as subobjects.

rockbox

Hm... I'll have to explore this concept more. Thanks throttlekitty!