Help with selecting overlapping verts: Max 7 Skin

Sage

I have not used Max 7 skin in some time and noticed that it seems to be missing the weight tool. In the weight tool you can grow and shrink your selection of verts. I'm wondering of an easy way to select vertices that are on top of each other in Max 7 so I can assign it to the correct bone. In my case I'm rigging a tank which is easy as long as you are able select the correct verts. My verts overlap where the gun barrel enter the turret and I can't seem to select the correct one and it's a little difficult to select the verts where the turret of tank rest on the chassis. I tried and see if I selected the verts in epoly and went up the stack to skin to see if they kept the selection but it doesn't. I remember when I used to use physique in Max 3 it let you more or less get around this issue, but with skin in Max 7 I seem to be at a loss of ideas. I was going to detach each element and add a skin modifier to it and save it's weights then re attach each element and hope that would load the saved weights but I was hoping there was a more efficient way of doing this. Thanks.

Alex

here is an example of what I mean

Eric Chadwick

Find the "Skin or die" script, should be a link in the plugins sticky. It has an option to hide sets of verts while in Skin. When you select the visible skin verts, the hidden verts may look like they're still being selected, but they aren't being weighted.

Sage

Thanks Eric. I did play around with just Skin and was able to select the verts just by clicking on them, I look at the skin or die script and since it sounds very useful.

Alex

Eric Chadwick

Cool. I don't think Max 7 has select by element in Skin. But Skin or Die does have this, which would be even better than the Hide function.

Sage

Skin in Max 7 is pretty basic, but it let me select the verts I needed, must of been a fluke. I was surprised actually. I'm glad they better selection tools in Max 8 and 9 however I don't get why the hell they are not consistent with their tools. Epoly and emesh let you select, edges, faces, verts, and ELEMENT, you would think users would love to be able to select by element in a rigging tool. It's not rocket science, it's an essential need for rigging. Physique was close to have a bad workaround but at least it had something. What ticks me off is skin got developed as a replacement to physique yet they drop the ball, well really as way to shut up the pissed off users that couldn't rig their models without buying plugins before version 3.1. Max 9 doesn't have select by element in skin either but at least you have a workaround. Maybe Max 20 won't crash, have a stable core, import/export Maya and obj files correctly, fix seams in an automated fashion, excellent boolean tools for easy creation of complex models, a node base material editor , a real time shaded view like smoothed shade, that shows all the maps the program supports in real time including real time display of video post fx, and real time preview of textures blended with say vertex colors or layered with different uv channels. An skin will have a select by element and any other selection tool that epoly may have. Yes I can see it now.... yeah right...

Wait a minute, Max 9 does have select by element...
Impressive, most impressive, a tiny tick box but it's there.

Alex