Rigging in 3dsmax

movento

Hey guys,recently i started learning 3dsmax and i have some trouble rigging a model.
I use the skeleton of the game Prey. When i pick all the bones and hit initialize,the model disappears so i click the light button next to the physique modifier and then the model appears.
However,when i select a bone and rotate it,the model doesn't rotate along

Any suggestions?

Rob Galanakis

Use Skin, not Physique. They really need to take that goddamn modifier out of Max.

The Max help has good tutorials for starting with the Skin modifier.

EDIT: Wow I must have hit that a fraction of a second before MoP, when I Saved my post his even showed up.. NICE!

MoP

Try using the Skin modifier instead of Physique, it's more up to date and a lot of the time can be easier to use.

Edit: Beaten to the punch by Rob! I was gonna recommend the Help too

movento

Thank you both for the help. I'd also like to thank Psyko for his tutorial about the skin modfiier, it's really helpfull.
I have another question now.
I want to export this to a .md5mesh so i need to assign all the vertices to a bone,correct?
So what i want is that some vertices don't move when the bone rotates.
Is there a way to do that?

Sam Hatami

Yes, you need to assign them to atleast one bone and also add a material to it,could just be a default one. If the mesh starts to resize, gets deformed you might need to add xForms to keep the scale and rotations of it. I had lots of issues to get the scale correct without ruining the mesh itself. Be sure to check the script output line (don't know if thats the right name for it) so that it uses the correct parent bone for the export.


Since you asked about the md5mesh, one tip Be sure to import/export before you bake a normal for the md5, otherwise you'll end up with the wrong shading.

You can search for md5 here, I think I posted three topics on md5mesh.


Edit: Forgot to answer your other question. Use the skin modifier to assign vertex to the bones you want, you weight them with the weighting tools to get different amount of influence from each bone. You might need one parent bone that moves the entire thing and children bones that influence each specific part of the mesh itself.

Mark Dygert

Physique only works with biped.

It won't work with imported skeletons or custom bones. It was put in 3ds as part of Character Studio (now called biped) if I remember correctly.

When it does work (as intended) it has some nice features and makes for some really quick skinning. I love its deformable envelopes unlike skins hard capsules.

As for ripping it out, before they do that, skin could use an overhaul and while that is happening they could take a few lessons from physique and really become something great and fast to use. But I'd rather them work on stability first because both are buggy as hell at times.

So yea long story short:
- Physique only works with biped.
- It has some great features, BUT...
- Its not recognized by a few exporters/importers.
- In general for work in games, you'll want to use skin. (Like everyone already said)

LEViATHAN

Vig wrote: »

Physique only works with biped.

It won't work with imported skeletons or custom bones. It was put in 3ds as part of Character Studio (now called biped) if I remember correctly.

I've used physique plenty of times for custom (as in non-biped) rigs. :poly141:

Mark Dygert

Ooo nice! They must have fixed it since the last time I tried it which was around 3dsmax5. Or maybe I was doing it wrong (entirely possible). I've only ever used it on bipeds since, which it more or less works great.

Good to know I'll have to give it a spin on some custom rigs and test it out. We also use PuppetShop and it would be great if it played nice!

Have you ever tried starting with Physique for improved envelopes and then transfer to skin for final weighting? I've been meaning to try and work out something like that.

LEViATHAN

Well I use physique for rigging, since I cba to learn skin at this point. I usually just rig half of the model though, then convert it to skin (plugin) and use skin's mirror function to mirror the weights.

So yeah, what you're trying to do should be possible.

MoP

The thing about Physique with non-biped rigs is you have to have a "terminator" node at the end of each joint chain, which is fairly silly IMHO. If you don't do this, you will miss the end joint of every chain.

Mark Dygert

Ahh... that makes a lot of sense, no wonder biped has dummies at the end of every chain. I'm pretty sure the rig I made (over 3 years ago) didn't have terminators and I'm pretty sure that wasn't my only problem, I couldn't get it to initialize.

I'll be skinning a new batch of characters later next month, I'll probably be using PuppetShop and physique. Thanks for the info guys! Sorry about the thread high jack. It just goes to show that you can learn anything in any thread in PC =P