max8 rigging error

Slipstream

For some strange reason, while I was rigging up this guy I decided not to add an extra helper bone at the joint between the arm and the shoulder/body, and I didn't realize my mistake until I was finished rigging and moving him through some tests.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/temetry/anim1.jpg

I'll redo the rig if I have to, but first I'd like to know if there's anyway I can add a bone in between the shoulder and bicep, without having to delete that entire section of the skeleton?

EDIT: Almost forgot
When I'm making the skeleton for the model I usually just do one half, and then mirror over the other half so that both sides are exactly the same. The problem with this though is that if I want the model say, lean back, then half of the torso might move in the proper direction while the other half stays in place as the shoulder isn't properly connected to the rest of the skeleton.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v416/temetry/anim2.jpg
Any suggestions on how to solve that?

Needles

have you tried linking the arm bones to the hierarchy?

Rick Stirling

Yes - maybe.

I think you want a roll bone? Like a twist bone? You dont want to hand key the roll bone, but to make it take on 1/2 the rotation of the the Bicep I would guess? This is the best method.


Put the bone in the place you want it.

Make the pivot of the roll bone match the pivot of the bicep.

Put an Expose Transform on the Characters Studio bicep bone (this is the easiest way to get rotation information out of character studio)

Next, you can use the Wire Parameters Dialogue to link the rotation of the Roll bone to the bicep and tell it that you want the X (I think) rotation of the roll bone to be 1/2 x of the bicep.

I might have missed a step, but I don't have max at home to check. Someone else may be able to fill in the gap.

Slipstream

Thanks for the replies guys
I hadn't known that I could link the bones to the hierarchy before, and now that I have the mirrored arm and leg are moving in sync with the rest of the skeleton.
I ran into another problem though. It's that I have the skin modifier applied, the model is fully weighted, and yet when I move one of the bones, the vertices don't move along with it.
Since its working fine in an earlier version of the file, I'm guessing I changed some kind of setting by accident, but I don't know what it was.

@Rick: I'm actually using the skin modifier for weighting now, but I think I can do something like what you're saying anyway, or at least something close to that

Rick Stirling

Yeah, I use the skin modifier for all my weighting - I thoguht you were asking about adding extra boens to the rig? Thats how we do it - we have the base CS rig, we add the extra bones, then we skin them.

The method I described was how to the add extra bones into a rig between other existing bones and then have the movement of the other bones control the movement of the new bones. You still have to skin the verts to them, but this method means that you don't have to hand animate the new ones.

Slipstream

All this time I've been making rigs from scratch for every model

Anyway I've added the extra bone and weighted it, and It's rotating perfectly at half the amount of the bicep, so thanks!
I haven't messed with max's rigging/animating features too much in the past so all this is pretty much new to me

The only problem now is I can't see the results of the new weighting applied to the mesh.

Now that I think about it I had the same problem when I played around with the skin modifier in max5 too, so its probably not just some random quirk of my computer.
Any ideas anyone?

SkullboX

[ QUOTE ]
I hadn't known that I could link the bones to the hierarchy before, and now that I have the mirrored arm and

[/ QUOTE ]

Well the 'hierarchy' of a rig is nothing but a bunch of bone objects linked together. If you create a bone chain, each new bone is simply linked to the previous one (or the one you clicked on), you can just as easily unlink two bones using the unlink button.

Now that you know this, you should go ahead and delete some redundant bones like in the hands, feet or the three smaller bones around the waist (just link the legs and first spine link to a point helper or dummy). For games this is more efficient, but when animating you're not bugged by useless bones you won't end up using, or useless bnoes you are forced to use only becuase otherwise the deformation won't work out as well as you had hoped.

If you want to add a bone inbetween two bones, the easiest way usually is to go to character -> bone tools (in max 7, I think it's the same in 8, do a search in the helpfiles) and then use the 'refine' options.

As for your problem with skin, make sure the little lightbulb is glowing in the stack next to the skin modifer. If it's not, that means you accedientally turned it off. Also make sure you don't have a sub object selected on your editable poly. If you have, skin will only work on the selected sub objects (which can be few or non at all).

Slipstream

Thanks!! that fixed the problem (turning off the sub-objects).
I didn't know that you could get rid of the unnecessary bones in the rig, either, so thanks for that as well