dire need of help with character studio.

John Warner

hey folks. i'm working on a project and i need to rig a character with character studio, which i used to do. this is back when i was a retard.

i simply can not believe how terrible and ancient of a system this is. i MUST be doing something wrong. isn't there a quicker way to do this? can't i fucking paint weights or something?

any help streamlining the rigging process would be wonderfuly appreiceated.

.. i can't begin to describe how many times easier it is to weight a character in xsi.

edit: can i use the skin modifier? i think this would acctualy be faster. thoughts?

edit 2: stopped character studio from creating envelopes and it's making my life 5 times easier. my god. also, i deleted 3 paragraphs of swear words from this thread. whew. felt good to write it though.

Rick Stirling

Use skin. You dont need to use physique

Snowfly

Depends on the exporter. Check if Skin will work with it, and if it does drop Physique

Ruz

skin is eay and fast. physique is not worth the hassle.

diZzyWalnut

Well, I'm using "physique" and it works well , after physique -

1) distribute properly the vertex on the links
= ( select , select by link , assign to link , remove from link)


2) lock assignements of the vertex on the all links


3) type_in_weights = ( for divide or share the vertex between 2,3 (or more) links
(exemple : 0,70 and 0,30 is 1,00 ... or 0,15 and 0,85 is 1,00 ...or 0,20 and 0,30 and 0,50 is 1,00
so,I think that's the best way how to divide the values between the links )


here's my GOBLIN_SPACE_MARINE ready for UT 2004 :


(animations : James Edwards, Steve Jones, animator dudes @ DE - copyright : Digital Extremes ).

John Warner

thanks for the heads up guys.

i'm acctualy finding a smoother work flow for physique, if i don't let it generate the enveloping. if i select the shin for example, and the middle row of the knee and apply it to the shin bone, and then take the theigh and the middle of the knee and apply it to the theigh bone, the middle row of the knee will have a weight of 1 to the theigh and shin bones, and will just blend properly.

the problem i guess came when i was trying to take verts that were assigned to one bone, apply them to another, and i had the mode turned to "n links" instead of 'no blending' so it was just distributing things.

i'm considering doing a weighting tutorial in xsi. if people acctualy use max to do this type of thing on a regualr basis............. sheesh.

FatAssasin

People don't usually use Physique any more. Don't judge Max's skinning workflow based on an obsolete tool. Physique isn't even being developed anymore, Skin is where is at these days, especially with Max 8. Lots of new toys to play with.

But I would like to see what XSI's tools are like and see if I'm missing anything.

Rakile

I should give XSI another shot. I got really ticked off with it by trying to teach it to myself and work on a half life 2 mod at the same time.

As for Character studio, I don't even use it unless I have to. And if you don't like building skeletons from scratch, I've heard that CAT is much, much better that Character studio. The main problem with CS is that you have no way to simply paint wieghts.

JO420

[ QUOTE ]
I should give XSI another shot. I got really ticked off with it by trying to teach it to myself and work on a half life 2 mod at the same time.

As for Character studio, I don't even use it unless I have to. And if you don't like building skeletons from scratch, I've heard that CAT is much, much better that Character studio. The main problem with CS is that you have no way to simply paint wieghts.

[/ QUOTE ]


Well character studio is just the skeletal system,the actual weight painting is done on various modifiers added.

Skin is a damn great tool,once i learned how to use it i dropped physique,skin is fast an easy.

MoP

JO420: Heh, Physique is the modifier part of Character Studio, Biped being the skeletal system

I actually find Physique very fast and easy for low-poly models, however I've also been using Skin a lot more, recently. It's just generally better.

danr

yeah, as MoP says : physique is super fast for the low (and i mean low, sub 500) poly side of things. Select based on colour, assign, lock, select, etc, ba-zing. Can do all joints for a low-poly mesh in a matter of, well, seconds. It can be as fast as it takes your hand to move across the keyboard. But ... anything more than that and it's as clunky as fuckerage.

John Warner

interesting. yah, i'm finding that physique is pretty quick for the job i'm doing, so it's all good. i'm making a low poly model, so that's nice.

of course, as it happens, they might as me to go back and re weight it using skin.. sigh.. the next time i'm given an assignment i'm goign to nag and nag and nag untill i get every last little detial.

Delaney King

If there are any new 3dsmax users here, please just stick to learning skin and ignore physique unless you absolutely, absolutely have to because of an old engine.
Skin is properly supported and actively debugged, physique really isn't and it uses really clunky code.
Besides, skin actually has mirror mode, is non-heirarchical (meaning all those bastard little dummies you find in a biped dont need to be exported and you dont get attached objects cluttering up your rig with extra envelopes).

Remember, you can skin half a single character whilst playing a run cycle in slow motion, mirror the weights from one side to the other and make minor tweaks. You can then output your skin as a skin data mesh (in skintools- check the tools rollour) and use it to paste the weights onto another character.

Skin is excellent for low poly characters, especially when you "flip" the weights table... it lets you scan your models weights for errors with a single sweep of your mouse.

If your new to it all dont forget to check for the physique to skin scripts floating around... I used one on the Prince of Persia 1 demos we did at Discreet a while ago to convert all the prince models over to skin. It took about five minutes to do and then I could really pull off some quick demos.

Conversely, all the characters I did in Unreal Tournament 04 I had to do with Physique, and it took pretty much a whole day to rig a dude. I could do it in about ten mins in skin.

So, basically skin is good.

FatAssasin

What do you mean by, "flip the weights table"? Sounds interesting.

Frankie V

Physique and CS are band-aid solutions left over from a time when Max did not have a proper IK solution or a functional skin modifier.

Not to say that Physique and CS are bad….. if you like to bake using Betty Crocker.

FatAssasin

Character Studio itself it still being heavily developed. There are many new features for it in Max 8. So I'd hardly call it a band-aid solution. Physique, though, is a different story.

Rakile

I've never had much success with mirroring weights under the skin modifier. I'm probably doing something in the wrong order. Maybe I misread something in the tutorials.