[Skinning] I cant change the weight of any verts

Shuriken UK

I'm currently trying to skin an alien death tentacle, and I dont know if I'm going about this the wrong way, but heres what I've done so far, followed by the problem I'm having:-

-Created the main body of the tentacle
-Unwrapped it
-Created a lethal "barb" which can be extended from the "mouth" of the tentacle (a seperate mesh)
-Unwrapped it

-Added a CAT system to the main tentacle consisting only of spine segments
-Added a single extra "bone" to the end of the spine, for weighting the barb!

-Added all of the CAT bones to the Skin mod of the tentacle model
-Added the single extra bone to the skin mod of the barb

-Started weighting the barb....Unable to change the weight of ANY verts on the barb! ("what the hell man!?")

I've tried a few things, but nothing seems to work. The weight is permanently stuck at 100%.

Any ideas what might be causing this?

Thanks

Edit: I may have figured it out... Could it be because the barb has only one bone assigned to it?

Psyk0

I'm pretty sure having only one bone is the problem, to share weight you need at least two bones, you could always assign one from the CAT and use it as an "anchor".

monster

If that happens to not be the problem try downloading the latest update for your version of Max. Max 2012 shipped with a bug that broke the skin modifier.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/index?siteID=123112&id=2334435&linkID=9241178

Shuriken UK

Thanks for the replies, I actually haven't updated for a little while! I just haven't done THAT much skinning before (I've modelled and skinned 2 very simple characters, and currently working on others), so even the stupidest, most trivial things can often confuse me lol.