Rigging for UT3 3ds Max

erik!

We need to get our characters into the engine, but we have never used Max for rigging before so we're kinda flying blind. It seems from my research that we need to use the Skin modifier and edit the envelopes. Again, don't really know how to go about doing that. I've seen Poop's tutorial a while back, I'll have to take a look at that again. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Mark Dygert

I'm not sure if you can use Character Studio/Biped or not but it has some pretty easy to use features, it also has some minor headaches but if Epic used Biped it will make things that much easier if you also use it. Basically you have the work flow correct, create skeleton, apply skin, tweak envelopes, hand tweak/paint problem areas and animate.

If you use biped you create the biped, turn on figure mode position and scale the pieces to fit your character, exit figure mode, apply skin, and start rigging. where biped really shines is in the import/export of animation and the ability to mix the clips together in motion mixer.

Also check out PuppetShop, it has similar features but is much much easier to work with when animating, but is also buggier then Biped and its UI isn't as fluid or as easy to use but I really like it for creating custom non-bipedal characters.

Rumkugel

ActorX should be available for other applications such as maya or xsi, if you´re not familiar with 3dsmax.
Check out UDN.

erik!

We're using the rigs that are available for download on the UDN, skinning our characters to their bones. We've figured out how to edit the envelopes (click on them duh!). It's still a little weird editing the weights, but we're making progress! Thanks for the speedy responses.

Mark Dygert

If it helps you can also create new cross sections, you can also copy envelopes and paste them onto other ones. Skin also has great mirror bone weights and vert weights options. If I wasn't rendering a few scenes I could be more specific.

aesir

I only use the envelopes to get a very basic weighting. From there, I go and click the button with a picture of a wrench on it and start adjusting weights manually. Go into the vert selection mode, select a lot of verts, choose an envelope, increase or decrease the weights. etc. Try putting your model in a crazy pose and tweak verts until it looks good. Adjust the pose a lot.

Mark Dygert

The big advantage of spending time on envelopes is that you can save out the envelopes and apply them to another character regardless of the vert count. If you get a good set of envelopes it makes skinning any new character much quicker as you'll have less hand weighting to do. Aesir brings up another good point also about changing the pose. It can also be helpful to animate the character through extreme poses, save that out as a bip file and load that on to any new character you're about to skin either by using the motion mixer or by just loading the bip file.