Attaching Skin Modifiers 3Ds Max 2016

Semi_Rukiya

Hello there! I'm new here but I believe this is the only forum left that could help me out with my problem (the rest of the ones I know are dead). Sooo, let's start. I want to modify a character model to an old game. I'm importing it into Max with animations. It's actually parted to pieces, like head, torso, legs, hands etc. I've created a new unwrap, I've used a Turbosmooth modifier... And now what? I've had to convert all parts into one piece so I could do my unwrap properly so everything could match. So now my NEW model contains only one element, with unwrap and baked turbosmooth (so being more specify it has only Edit Mesh modifier). I would like to attach skin modifiers from the OLD one now so I will be able to use the same bones and animations on the NEW one. I've combined with many ways to do so: Skin Wrap, Skin Utility, I even parted my NEW model into pieces just like the OLD one and I just copied the skin modifier from the OLD elements to the NEW ones. Well it kinda worked. Kinda. The problem is when I run the animation on it, all elements of my model are parted by a small break, so You can clearly see that. I'm lack of ideas now... What can I do?

Cheers, Me.

Semi_Rukiya

Bump

Noren

If you want to export your model back into the same game, you'll probably want to copy the same exact makeup.

You don't need to attach everything to one mesh to have a common unwrap, you can apply the unwrap modifier to several meshes at once.

Both Skin Wrap and Skin Utilities should be able to transfer the old skinning to your new mesh. In case of Skin Wrap you can add several meshes and in case of Skin Utilities you can merge the saved meshes if I recall correctly (weights are in the vertex channels)

Not sure about copying the Skin modifier over, but to my knowledge that shouldn't work with baked vertices  and completely different meshes, but maybe you got lucky if you used the old meshes as a start or there are no baked vertices. I might be wrong about this point, though.

If the break you refer to is a smoothing group change, you can try to unify the normals of the respective vertices with the edit normals modifier.
If it's a gap you'll have to assign the same vertex weights to the corresponding edge vertices.

Semi_Rukiya

Hello, Noren. Thanks for reply. I know I can apply unwrap to each of those elements, but it will be more difficult to unwrap each of them so everything will match well as I did mention before. Of course, I could just sit a bit longer on that and I will get the exact same effect, but You know, it's not only about the time. Another reason I did want to be able to copy Skin Modifier is the fact I need to convert my object to edit mesh/poly so I can bake my new unwrap. So that's another problem. Or maybe there's another way to bake it without collapsing all modifiers by conversion?

Cheers, Me.

Noren

Not sure if we are on the same page, here, but what I meant is that you can select all of your meshes and apply UV Unwrap to all of them at once and edit them at the same time while they are still separate meshes. (Unless you mean there is e. g. a cut in an arm that you'd rather have welded in the UV's. )

You could use a merged copy of your mesh for baking.

Semi_Rukiya

Okay, I've found out the solution. Thanks for Your tip about unwrapping all elements at once! About the bake I've found another solution. I just moved the unwrap modifier between Skin and Edit mesh and I did Collapse To. Thanks to that I've saved the Skin Modifier. Thank You for Your help

Cheers, Me.