attaching/detaching skinned meshes in 3D max ?

AFsoft

Hi,
the title say's it all. i need to know how i can do this?
i have the head of the character attached to the hands. its coming from mixamo auto rigger. 
or i want to add other parts merged together, in 3ds max. 
any idea ?

poopipe

You can use the skin weight export utility (I forget the exact name) but tbh, with something that simple I'd probably just reskin it from scratch after attaching everything.

I expect you could copy the weights into a vertex colour or uv channel and reapply them after attaching too.

It's a question of how comfortable you are with the guts of max really

AFsoft

poopipe said:

You can use the skin weight export utility (I forget the exact name) but tbh, with something that simple I'd probably just reskin it from scratch after attaching everything.

I expect you could copy the weights into a vertex colour or uv channel and reapply them after attaching too.

It's a question of how comfortable you are with the guts of max really

thanks for this, i think i found something more useful. it was on cgsociety records.
" if you clone your mesh, you could do everything and then transfer the skinning using the skin utilities. As with everything in Max there is atleast 5-10 different ways to do it."

Shuma

I never used the Skin utilities in max, but for this kind of things i use Skinwrap.
Make a copy of your mesh with skin, attach them, apply a skinWrap, add your 2 originals meshes that have a Skin modifier and convert to skin

Mark Dygert

Yep, what Shuma said works great.

AFsoft

Shuma said:

I never used the Skin utilities in max, but for this kind of things i use Skinwrap.
Make a copy of your mesh with skin, attach them, apply a skinWrap, add your 2 originals meshes that have a Skin modifier and convert to skin

thanks, ill try it. 

AFsoft

Shuma said:

I never used the Skin utilities in max, but for this kind of things i use Skinwrap.
Make a copy of your mesh with skin, attach them, apply a skinWrap, add your 2 originals meshes that have a Skin modifier and convert to skin

i have a problem,
as you can see, the hands and head are merged together in the skinned mesh coming from the mixamo.
and i need to detach hands from the head before i can do this. my question is, how i can do that ?

before you answer, i think i can duplicate the body mesh in mixamo,
i can also do the merges before i send it to mixamo auto rigger. 

AFsoft

edit : this solved all my problem !Mark Dygert said:

Yep, what Shuma said works great.

Shuma said:

I never used the Skin utilities in max, but for this kind of things i use Skinwrap.
Make a copy of your mesh with skin, attach them, apply a skinWrap, add your 2 originals meshes that have a Skin modifier and convert to skin

Mark Dygert

Jep, you can break apart the meshes however you need, skinwrap only looks at a tiny section around each vert for weighting info to steal. You can have drastically different topology or even a small fraction of the original mesh and it will work fine.

Other transfer methods work on the vert numbering and will assign weights based on those numbers. That only works if your vert numbers match, if vert one was in the face and on the new mesh it's in the foot, the face weights get assigned to the foot and things go all kinds of fucky. Some transfer tools require meshes to have an identical number of verts. It just sucks... but skinwrap is awesome it gets around all that.

Which is something to keep in mind if you ever end up with a lot of pieces, gear or equipment that you have to skin. If you have a base body with super sexy skin weights you can just skinwrap the new gear and get one hell of a start on your skinning. It saves a TON of time.

poopipe

The easiest way to detach parts is to duplicate the skinned mesh and delete the bits you don't want from each copy under the skin modifier.  You don't lose any skinning data that way 

AFsoft

poopipe said:

The easiest way to detach parts is to duplicate the skinned mesh and delete the bits you don't want from each copy under the skin modifier.  You don't lose any skinning data that way 

every time i do this, for some reason my mesh turns to pure black. seems to be a bug. 

Mark Dygert

That could be for a few reasons.

1) If there are normal maps and you break a welded surface it will cause the normals to recalculate making the normal map invalid. It usually doesn't go all black, you just get weird seams.

2) Usually when it goes all black max has incorrectly calculated the shading normals or smoothing groups (roughly the same thing) and you need to collapse the stack to get them to rebuild. It tends to do this a lot with imported geometry and won't go away until you collapse the stack. It also happens when you convert from Edit Mesh to Edit Poly... such a weird and annoying bug, especially when you have a modifier stack that can't be collapsed easily.

Doing edits under the skin modifier is a dicey operation but it can work out ok. Most of the time it is better to copy, edit, reset xform and collapse then skinwrap.

Doing edits above the skin modifier is a recipe for disaster, especially when exporting. If you stay in max it can work out OK, but that old geometry is still hanging around in the objects history and can cause problems, if not just slow your scene down. Many apps don't work with max's modifiers the same way and most don't handle geometry edits after skin, very well at all. A few will read the object type of the highest modifier and treat it like geometry and ignore the skinning. It is a best practice to keep your final export clean and to not be lazy

monster

I'm short on time so I didn't read the entire threads (just the title).

Here's my skin detaching and combining script:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nz9sa0prhbafhhj/Skin_CombineSkin.ms?dl=0

AFsoft

Mark Dygert said:

That could be for a few reasons.

1) If there are normal maps and you break a welded surface it will cause the normals to recalculate making the normal map invalid. It usually doesn't go all black, you just get weird seams.

2) Usually when it goes all black max has incorrectly calculated the shading normals or smoothing groups (roughly the same thing) and you need to collapse the stack to get them to rebuild. It tends to do this a lot with imported geometry and won't go away until you collapse the stack. It also happens when you convert from Edit Mesh to Edit Poly... such a weird and annoying bug, especially when you have a modifier stack that can't be collapsed easily.

Doing edits under the skin modifier is a dicey operation but it can work out ok. Most of the time it is better to copy, edit, reset xform and collapse then skinwrap.

Doing edits above the skin modifier is a recipe for disaster, especially when exporting. If you stay in max it can work out OK, but that old geometry is still hanging around in the objects history and can cause problems, if not just slow your scene down. Many apps don't work with max's modifiers the same way and most don't handle geometry edits after skin, very well at all. A few will read the object type of the highest modifier and treat it like geometry and ignore the skinning. It is a best practice to keep your final export clean and to not be lazy

no, this seems to be a bug, when i add an unwrap modifier it goes ok, that clear things and seems to lose uv data after doing an operation on the skin modifier. 

AFsoft

monster said:

I'm short on time so I didn't read the entire threads (just the title).

Here's my skin detaching and combining script:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nz9sa0prhbafhhj/Skin_CombineSkin.ms?dl=0

wow, huge thanks for this, ill try it! thanks !