In the dumps on character project...failure almost imminnent

spectre1130

So I've been working on a character project at school for weeks now. Everything was going okay for my first try at character modelling until the rigging/skinning/weights portion. I had my weights done, albeit not very well, the character posed-pretty badly I might add, and then somehow lost all my work when I tried to go back into poly mode to rearrange some topology, even when I had saved the envelopes and tried to reload them. Max erased all my layers and the biped itself for some crazy reason. I had to abandon that scene and go back to an earlier iteration of the file.
Now I'm having the same problem as before. I have reset X-form 10,000 times on my model, re-skinned, and animated some movement just on one bone in the hopes of being able to mirror weights. I cannot mirror weights at all no matter how many times I try. I had spent days on my weights for naught. I am supposed to be finishing the lighting and rendering out my turntable animation today, and now I'm screwed.
I am sorry to rant, but I have lost all hope of getting a posed character now.
Any advice on mirroring weights is definately needed/appreciated, as I just don't have the time, or brain power, left to redo all the weights fast enough to get the rest of the project finished by Tuesday at 6pm.

p.s. Please excuse my punctuation-I'm spent:poly141:

poopipe

have you adjusted the mirror threshold?
do it until the red bones turn green/blue

are you working to scale? eg 1 unit = 1cm or 1 inch? if you don't the numbers in the modifiers become meaningless

also, bake your weights and export them to a mesh with skin utilities when you're happy with them - its better than saving envelopes because it works properly and you can do it on partial meshes

spectre1130

Yes I have. I select the object I just weighted, select all the verts, and select mirror mode. All my verts display as red. To my understanding, the verts you select should be the colors of that sides bones-either blue or green, and the corresponding sides verts are supposed to display as its sides color. If they are red, the weights cannot be mirrored. Just for the hell of it, I just hit the paste opposite option to see if it works and it just wont. When I move the other sides corresponding bone the weights are not copied.

poopipe

ok-

can you see the mirror plane? if no - things are in the wrong place, like your mesh related to your bind pose

is it in the middle where it should be? no? see above

have you stopped working with envelopes and tried using the vertex buttons instead? no? trust me - envelopes are the devils work. weight everything manually

spectre1130

Yes I am weighting everything manually. I can see the mirror plane. I select the object I just weighted-mirror mode-copy blue to green-move the corresponding bone on opposite side-weights are not pasted.

poopipe

if all verts and bone things are red then the mirror threshold is probably way too low eg. 0

if increasing the mirror threshold doesn't work you'd be better off weighting the thing by hand than buggering about trying to fix it with one click this close to a deadline


it wouldnt' be the first time I've seen skin mirroring not work

spectre1130

I hear you on that. I just don't think I'll get it right in time. Thanks for the responses. I am going to try my best.

Psyk0

Try bioskin, i still use it with max 2010. Select verts, hit mirror selected and you're done. I've had some issues with mirroring in older max version, i still keep it around.

poopipe

ooh - totslly forgot.

you are fully service packed right? 2012 came with broken skinning

im going to look at this bioskin thing too - cheers

spectre1130

I pushed through and re-weighted the character. Was up all night till 8 am to finish that and the turntable animation diffuse pass. Also ran an AO pass for the turntable as well. The weight are not as good as the first time, and the damn modifier kept giving me problems. I am using 2012 and don't think I have any service packs installed. 2012 has a slew of problems as compared to what I started on, which was 2011. I think I might go ahead and post the final result in the crits thread as a first work post.

thanks

poopipe

Get the service packs. skin was all but unusable in a production environment at release so I'm not surprised you've had trouble. SP1 made a huge difference and it's been very good (better than 2009) since we put it on - im half reluctant to roll out SP2 for fear of rocking the boat to be honest.

The yearly release cycle is ruining max imo, every version since 9 has been a trainwreck

spectre1130

poopipe wrote: »

Get the service packs. skin was all but unusable in a production environment at release so I'm not surprised you've had trouble. SP1 made a huge difference and it's been very good (better than 2009) since we put it on - im half reluctant to roll out SP2 for fear of rocking the boat to be honest.

The yearly release cycle is ruining max imo, every version since 9 has been a trainwreck

Ditto on that!
So do I just need to go to Autodesk for the service pack I assume?

pinkbox

link to service packs for ya
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/index?siteID=123112&id=2334435&linkID=9241178#section1

spectre1130

Sweet, thanks!