Vertice XYZ placement weighting bones

oXYnary

Is there a plug-in for max that allows you to choose how many bones can be used at once, then drag the vertices in the world into the position you are after for a certain pose/frame and realtime or with a pause it tries to get as close to that position by measuring the surrounding bones weighting.

Sounds overly complicated, but haven't you gotten to that one edge or vertice that you spend a long time trying to get to work in a certain pose especially by minuscule amounts trying to adjust the bone weights. This would be easier for me at least than haphazard wastes of time trying to get the measurements right by guessing.

I also realize there would be a "shifting" after you executed it (or realtime if it only allowed the vertice to be constrained to the possible positions with the bones choosen) as the plug in could only get as close as possible.

Eric Chadwick

Not that I know of. I know your frustration though, been there. The weight-averaging tools do help some, better than going bone-by-bone.

There is the Skin Morph modifier, helps solve the difficult-weighting problem, but doesn't bake weights into the new morph shape.

IIRC someone said their game exporter added support for Skin Morph, or something like it.

We have something similar, we can use morphs and bone transforms at the same time. It's still primitive though, need some tool programmer time to flesh it out. We're working on a feature to mask off parts of the mesh so only those verts are affected by the transform/morph combo (or any other effects like material change).

Edit... here's an old example of ours showing the bones and morphs blending at the same time. Blending a lot at once: materials, UVs, mesh shapes, bone lengths, bone weights. But you could easily limit it to just bones + morphs.
http://www.whatif-productions.com/Video/20041004protean.wmv (5.3MB video)