3ds max (2019) noobish questions about IK and CAT

anotherdoseofcorey

Yo!  

What's bopping polycount!? I'm new around here hoping to get some help. 

I've finally started to dive into the world of IK and CAT rigging and my oh my am I stuck in a few places. 

My first question has to deal with weighing through vertices on a model as you can see on the images attached below the difference between the two is that my version of Max doesn't have the red vertices indicating the respective bone is selected. Although I can still click on certain vertices to weigh. Things are a tad difficult to gauge what vertices are and aren't part of the bone. 

I've tried googling for forums with a similar issue. Perhaps it was something turned off in the preferences/viewport. None of the changes I made yielded any results or any of the searching. 


 
Secondly, 

This is more of a general question pertaining to IK targets with Cat rigs. When establishing IK targets for let's say the arms how do you stop the Inner arms from stretching outward?

Is this a weighing issue on an actual model or do you need to apply more IK target to keep things stabilized? I'm genuinely lost I've been attempting to rig a female model and just change her posture, but the inner arms keep stretching when I move the hand and or target. Why does the CAT rig stretch like that?


I'd imagine the woman model is more of a skinning issue, 


 

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.  

monster

1. Sometimes the vertices don't show up because of a video card driver issue. Could be a DPI issue too if you changed your Windows 10 dpi settings. Or you could have vertex ticks turned off in the preferences. Without sitting at your workstation it'll be hard to debug.

But you can hotkey Select Verts Assigned to Bone in the Skin Modifier category. That'll select all the verts the selected bone is influencing. You may need to run Remove Zero Weights from advanced parameters to prune the unused weights before running Select Verts Assigned to Bone.

2. I don't really know what you are describing. Is the problem the character model or the bones? If you mean the bones are stretching, it's because you are in setup mode. If you make and Abs layer and enable Animation (the big red button in your screenshot) then it won't stretch anymore.

anotherdoseofcorey

monster said:

1. Sometimes the vertices don't show up because of a video card driver issue. Could be a DPI issue too if you changed your Windows 10 dpi settings. Or you could have vertex ticks turned off in the preferences. Without sitting at your workstation it'll be hard to debug.

But you can hotkey Select Verts Assigned to Bone in the Skin Modifier category. That'll select all the verts the selected bone is influencing. You may need to run Remove Zero Weights from advanced parameters to prune the unused weights before running Select Verts Assigned to Bone.

2. I don't really know what you are describing. Is the problem the character model or the bones? If you mean the bones are stretching, it's because you are in setup mode. If you make and Abs layer and enable Animation (the big red button in your screenshot) then it won't stretch anymore.

Hey Juan!

Yeah, I play around with some of your suggestions. I didn't even think it could be a video card issue that's pretty fuckey. Yeah, I wish I had people who actually fucked with Max and Maya at my UNI. 

2. You pretty much answered my question with Abs layer solution I didn't think to do that I'm an idiot. That basically solves all my problems right there and then. I just need to find a better way to skin my models at this point. What do you recommend when skinning the legs cause god damn do I have the hardest time getting the thighs to not drag the stomach area. 

monster

If it's really low poly like your first image I just use vertex skinning. It gets a lot faster with practice.

If it's mid or high poly I use voxel binding with Max Influence at 4 (for games) and Falloff set to 0.5 or 1.0. Then fix the head manually. (It gets most everything pretty good except the head.)

https://youtu.be/sSWnwsP2z6o

anotherdoseofcorey

monster said:

If it's really low poly like your first image I just use vertex skinning. It gets a lot faster with practice.

If it's mid or high poly I use voxel binding with Max Influence at 4 (for games) and Falloff set to 0.5 or 1.0. Then fix the head manually. (It gets most everything pretty good except the head.)

https://youtu.be/sSWnwsP2z6o

Cool, cool thanks for the video link I'll definitely start digesting and learning what I can here.