3dsmax bones
polycounter lvl 19
there must be an easier way.
I accidently hit "reset all bones" while finishing off a skin that took me over an hour. hit undo. Undo DOES NOTHING!!! why?!?!? It just reset the bones back to their original crappy envelopes, and can't be undone. Why does this option even exist?
I don't have char studio, and working with bones appears to be very very very frustrating. Paint weights doesn't do anything but give me squiggly lines. The verts don't come up colour coded. Switching from one bone to another wilst having wighted verts selected just copies these weights onto the selected bone.
There must be an easier way. Max seriously cannot be this frustrating.
I accidently hit "reset all bones" while finishing off a skin that took me over an hour. hit undo. Undo DOES NOTHING!!! why?!?!? It just reset the bones back to their original crappy envelopes, and can't be undone. Why does this option even exist?
I don't have char studio, and working with bones appears to be very very very frustrating. Paint weights doesn't do anything but give me squiggly lines. The verts don't come up colour coded. Switching from one bone to another wilst having wighted verts selected just copies these weights onto the selected bone.
There must be an easier way. Max seriously cannot be this frustrating.
Replies
I haven't had much trouble with the Skin modifier myself... then again, I don't really use Paint Weights. I'll probably be doing that this week though, so I'll let you know how it goes...
as for paint weights: I clicked it, painted. It draw a squiggly line.
I wouldn't bother using Paint Weights for low-poly things anyway, anything under 3000 polys i'd just hand-weight the verts using the Abs. Effect type-in thingy. Then again, I'm a n00b.
I find mirror weights doesn't always work, simply because we are working at such a small scale in max. I wrote a mirror script for sing weights though, so I can fixe any weights that don't mirrored. Its jsut a copy and paste thing that also mirrors the bone name.
And i agree that it is mighty confusing the first time you use it but just bite the bullet and figure it out.
But to clear up some things about painting, you *can* paint weights on verts outside of a bone's influence. The envelope size has nothing to do with it.
The verts don't have to be visible in order to paint their weighting.
Using max bones is no different than using CS bones when it comes to how Skin works. So don't think that if you were using CS it would be any easier.
The number one most important thing when painting weights is TURN OFF THE "PAINT BLEND WEIGHTS" CHECKBOX. Why it's on by default I'll never know. But what you're describing, "I clicked it, painted. It draw a squiggly line.", is exactly what happens when you have it turned on. Rick mentioned it, but didn't mention turning it off for paint weights to work as you would expect. It does come in very handy though after you're done painting. What it does is smooth out the weighting of verts you've already painted.
As far as mirroring goes, I've found it's easiest to stick with the "Mirror Paste" button. Forget about all the "Green to Blue" buttons. Select the verts or bones you want to mirror, go into "Mirror Mode", make sure there are no, or very few, red verts or bones on the other side, and hit "Mirror Paste". Adjust the thresh amount if necessary, and make sure the mirror plane is set correctly. It also helps to center your pivot and reset the xform on your model if you're having trouble.