Skinning to things other than bones?
polycounter lvl 10
Here's a thing I'm not really sure how to look up on Google...
I'm skinning stuff in 3DSMax and I've always found bones a little fiddly (grabbing a bone to move it around, doesn't work because it's stuck to the end of the previous one and it then rotates around), I've seen people do setups where they skin to a bone skeleton, then make additional helper objects for animating before exporting just the mesh and bones to a game engine. I'm not going to be exporting anything because I'm rendering in Max, so can I just skip the bone stage, and skin the meshes straight to the helper objects??
My learning about helper objects for animating is really just scratching the surface currently, is there some gotcha I might not have thought about in using a hierarchy of helpers instead of a bone hierarchy?
Thanks!
(Also, if anyone knows of any good resources for learning more advanced rigging techniques for Max, I'd love to see them!)
I'm skinning stuff in 3DSMax and I've always found bones a little fiddly (grabbing a bone to move it around, doesn't work because it's stuck to the end of the previous one and it then rotates around), I've seen people do setups where they skin to a bone skeleton, then make additional helper objects for animating before exporting just the mesh and bones to a game engine. I'm not going to be exporting anything because I'm rendering in Max, so can I just skip the bone stage, and skin the meshes straight to the helper objects??
My learning about helper objects for animating is really just scratching the surface currently, is there some gotcha I might not have thought about in using a hierarchy of helpers instead of a bone hierarchy?
Thanks!
(Also, if anyone knows of any good resources for learning more advanced rigging techniques for Max, I'd love to see them!)
Replies
In fact, in most cases when you hook a bunch of objects together in a hierarchy you end up with what are effectively bones
The thing is, bones were invented so we had a better way to build Skeletons. They give you a visual representation of the hierarchy, prevent you from doing silly things like moving a child away from it's parent(which breaks your rig) and so on...
The skeleton plus helper object method is what everyone uses because it's the safest and most effective one.
WRT advanced rigging tutorials.. I suggest you Google up something that explains how to set up an fk/IK blend rig. That'll cover the main principles and show you most of the tricks you'll need to build more interesting setups.