Multiple Skin Modifiers on Single Mesh or: How to Weight Facial Bones properly?

Raildex

Hi there.

I have a question for 3Ds Max.
Is it possible to put multiple Skin Modifiers ontop of each other?
My idea was to have multiple Skins that affect different parts of the Mesh.
For example:

Skin -> Mouth, Lips
Skin -> Eyebrows, Eyelids
Skin -> Neck, Head as a whole

Putting everything into a single Skin Modifer NEVER works, as soon as I delete Weights, it messes everything up (Bones that did not affect vertices start to affect them when deleting weights for example)

However, I can't seem to make it work with multiple Skin Modifers. Maybe there is some hidden Option I missed?

If you have tips for Facial rigging, I am open for advice :P

poopipe

Multiple skin modifiers isn't a good idea, deforming a mesh that's already deformed will lead to unpredictable results.  Most game exporters will ignore the extra ones anyway 

The best way to skin in max is to explicitly set hard weights on verts and then go over the mesh and sort out blending. If you rely on envelopes and don't bake weights you open yourself up to all sorts of ballache. 

I use the little spanner popout window to lay out the main weights and coarse blending and have a couple of scripts to help average out weights across groups of verts. 
Doing this will effectively bake the weights so you don't get shifting when you add or remove bones. 

Honestly this sounds like you just need to practice a bit, skinning is time consuming and awkward but with experience you can bang stuff out pretty quickly. 

monster

Raildex said:

...as soon as I delete Weights, it messes everything up...

As a general rule, not just for faces, don't delete or subtract weighting. Select the bone you want to give weights to and add instead. When subtracting weights it divides up the weighting between all bones in the influence list. This can lead to unwanted results.

Remember, just add weights.