Thank you for your feedback, I agree with what you're saying. I'm curious about the smoothed over fixtures. Did you paint over those just to help remove the gaps there or are you saying instead of mini-rectangles, there should be just longer ones going vertically?
Is is possible to weight vertices using CAT like you can with Biped in Max? If so, how? The options appear to be there; 'include selected vertices' etc but I don't seem to be able to actually select any verts, only edit the envelopes which is ok to a point but there's a few stray verts that I need to fix. Thanks
No you need to manually split the vertices if you want to allow this. Smoothing groups are simply a way to get multiple vertex normals into a single vertex. It doesn't actually duplicate vertices in the exported file. Only in the GPU for rendering.
Also if you have square UVs, try to rotate them to align them horizontal or vertical (so their edges are horizontal or vertical). This way you can pack them more easily and you also reduce the aliasing.
Really great answers here guys! Got it to work perfectly! Thank you for the help! I would like to know if it is possible to show the the painted vertices within the 3ds max viewport? Like can i paint the the vertices in UDK and show up like that in max?
Aren't blenders uv'tools always pretty much going to be controlled the same way the regular viewport is?, same way to move vertices, same way to align, same way to snap and split vertices, same way to work with the 3d mouse pointer, same but on a 2d plane.
Seriously though, best bet is to align the pouch vertices to the body vertices, if possible. Then copy the weights. The pouches will interpenetrate the body less during animations. Then test, see what works, what doesn't. Nothing teaches like experience!
If you zoom in further, does it still appear misaligned? If so, I think it's your vertices that are the problem, they must be slightly out of line. If they shimmer in and out of alignment, it could be a display issue. I'd bet on it being the vertices themselves.
Yes, but I use an Evoluent vertical mouse that's not really cheap, prefer not to take it back and forth. They're too expensive to get a second one, so I just ordered some generic cheap vertical mouse that should be better than what i have anyway.
your getting the pinching because you reinforced the vertical edge loops. I would say add some centered edge loops vertically around the corner so you have more sides instead of your two sided corner. That might help a little bit