MAX TIP: moving from physique to skin.

Delaney King

I get this question a lot. Skin or Physique.

my answer is: skin all the way baby.

A common mistake people make is that you DONT have to use physique on a biped, even though they where bundled together. Skin works fine.

So whats so good about skin?

Most importantly... You can remove, relink and add new bones from your heirarchy and not loose the rest of your rig.

You can mirror verts and envelopes, meaning you only need to do half of your character.

You can spit out a mesh with baked skin weights in the verts, edit it using edit poly and then project data onto other characters. (its under skintools in the tools rollout of 6).

In max 7 you can also use a low res skinned model and pass this data to a skin modifier in a higher res model. I use this to get my characters 80% of the way in a few clicks.

You can airbrush on weight data and blend it. (tip: set strength to .25, so it takes several brushes to weight. Pose the character in an extreme and then brush on the blend)

If you need 3 weight boning, you can turn the weight table sideways (look in the options) so that the vert numbers are across the top. Stray weights can then be spotted and killed with a single right click.

There are a number of free plugins available for improving the interface too if you have hundreds of characters to skin!

There are a heap more cool things, but I just wanted to let people know its a good option to look at, especially if your about to tackle a large project.

I hope this encourages a few people to switch... Physique is a curse on mankind that should be no longer suffered.

Bye yall.

Hollowmind

I agree! The only thing that took some adjusting for me was the way you assign individual verts to bones outside of envelopes. I was used to just selecting the verts, hitting Assign to Link, and selecting my link in the viewport. Took some adjusting having select the bone in the parameters rollout, then the verts, then adjust the abs spinner. But then I realized that's a much better way to do it cause I could play with the weighting right there instead of having to lock the verts then adjust the weighting.

I still have a lot to learn about skin but I like it a lot better already.

One thing I was wondering, is there a way to disable the envelopes on certain bones or all the bones? There were some parts of the current model I'm working on that that would've come in handy on.

pior

"In max 7 you can also use a low res skinned model and pass this data to a skin modifier in a higher res model. I use this to get my characters 80% of the way in a few clicks."

That sounds useful, didn't know that!

Say I have a rather strangely proportionned 3000 tris character to rig (orklike), and the base lowpolyrig is of the average human kind. Can I move the verts/scale the bones of the lowpoly mesh to fit to the silhouette of the orkish figure, and then transfer vertweights? That'd be plain great

Eric Chadwick

Disabling envelopes is easy, a couple scripts help with this (by scaling them down to zero).
http://www.rpmanager.com/freeTools.htm#skintools
http://mitglied.lycos.de/bogi1976/

That last one is just insane... it has nearly a million options. Some great stuff in there.

Hollowmind

I was just reading about the skin or die one. I'll have to try it out when I get home.

Eric Chadwick

The author is really open to suggestions too... I asked for alterations to the Quick Weight buttons, got a quick turnaround. Definitely worth an email if you have improvements to suggest, Andre's a helpful guy.

[btw, good stuff Dave!]

sledgy

Thanks for the tip on the scripts Eric, those look muy awesome.

FatAssasin

SkinTools

This is a good script for game engines because you can easily select or removing weighting from verts below a certain threshhold. Like clearing out all weighting below .1 for example. You can also select verts assigned to more than n number of bones. Plus some other useful tools. Same creator as the skin envelopes tool Eric posted above, it's old but still useful.