does anyone like skinning?

[hany-land]

did u try to use cracter stoudio?

[mark_battista]

well ive used CS before but this time i figured I better get used to using bones coz there's gonna come one day when I need to animate more than just two legs. So I've setup my skeleton and everything for the first time but Ive still got to skin it, by this I mean weighting of vertices to the mesh.. I just cant do it, its having my eyes out, arrrrggggh, please somebody help.
thx mark

[pencil-head]

yeah, skinnigs a bitch. i use skintools (http://www.scriptspot.com/download.asp?ID=510) script which makes life a little easier.

[mark_battista]

that link doesnt work m8, how do them skinning scripts work
cheers mark

[pencil-head]

Don't work? Worked for me. Any way go to www.scriptspot.com. search for the script called "Skintools". once you donload it, run like anyother script. go to utility panel, maxscript, run script.

[michaelcomet]

Skinning is one of those things that is a pain but is needed.

As a tip I suggest taking the vert at each area and weighting them 100% to one bone...then going back and weighting them in small percents like 0.25 or 25% etc to the adjacent bone etc to get the smooth weighting as needed.

Also I tend to animate my character from 1-100 or whatever from the default into some bent positions...so as I skin I can stay in the skin modifier, without leaving and simply "scrub time" to see how teh deformation looks...and keep tweaking without constantly going in/out of the modifier.

[mark_battista]

thx michael thats a top tip, especially the one about the animating the character from 1 to 100 or whatever, I'll let you know how i get on, right now im having trouble with the under arm section when the arm moves. Dork that I am, created a high res model with lots of bloody vertices.
regards
mark battista

[michaelcomet]

Yeah that's another skinning no no if you can help it. If you have a low poly model that you can meshsmooth on top, it's a heck of a lot easier to skin and weight.

If you have lots of vertex data though, then you may want to try to play more with envelopes and such to try to get a more general area working before you tweak. You may also want to consider doing things like using a lattice/FFD to deform an area then, instead of skin...but that can be a bit of a pain in Max.

Actually if you have lots of vertex you will probably want to use paint weights more than doing individual skin weighting.

And yes teh shoulders and hips are teh two most difficult areas to skin. Part of it requires having the proper pivot points/skeleton in the right place, the rest is getting it all to work right based on your model.

[mark_battista]

well, i've given up, i had such a nightmare with that skintools modifier and it was driving me crazy. All I could bloody see was verts everywhere. Also I had a big problem when trying to paste the weighting from one envelope and mirror it. Seemed when I moved the bone of the envelope i had just mirrored, the opposite side all skewed and started moving of its own accord. I tried painting weights but I just lack knowledge in the skin modifier and dont find it very intuitive at all. So as a last resort, I've bipeded the character and started using physique. Back to the old mod that I know so well.

So far its going good the shoulders are sorted anyway and the hips arn't giving me too much bother. A little tweaking here and there and hopefully I should be sorted. Im a little gutted though because I really wanted to use the skeleton that I had spent three days rigging up, (my first ever skeleton), I just hope that biped will be as good, doubt it tho, because I had all these expressions set up in my skeleton, controllers, the works and it was funky. Nevermind.

I just have one more question if anyone is familiar with biped;
I just loaded a motion capture file into the biped just too see how my mesh was deforming and for some reason instead of a walk, my character sort of squats like a monkey and walks. The actual biped file is meant to be an upright walk. Everything else seems to work ok except for this weird problem that I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on. I have saved a fig file of my biped and set the mocap data to use biped figure. I have also tried flattening footsteps to zero but this doesn't work either.
Its not a monumental thing, I just wanted to fathom out why it was doing this out of curiosity.

Help is gratefully received, oh and thx to michael (your a star for them tips and all your help),
regards
Mark Battista

[michaelcomet]

Well I would try going over the tutorial and docs for Skin first if you don't understand it.

Also while I can't help with the Biped Q, you know you CAN use Physique with any skeleton you want. ie: you could still use your custom skeleton, bit skin it with phyisique, or multiple physiques'. You just have to make sure you have a flow of bones/objects down the hierarchy with an extra tip bone at the end to let physique create the splines. Alternatively you could create a basic pure FK skeleton that has this, phsyique to it, and then reparent every FK bone to its corresponding real skeleton or control object you made.

[mark_battista]

woomph! That just went right over my head. Sorry I'm really new to rigging. Yeah I tried physique with it but when i went to initialise it, i didnt know what to pick, also i didnt seem to work right. I figured your tryna tell me how to do it but i'm clueless. Absolutely! Sorry dude.

If you could point me somewhere that would explain this in real labour mans terms that'd be cool.

Apologies for being so stupid
regards
mark

[michaelcomet]

Ok the way Physique works is you give it the top top top first parent of a hierarchy and it recurses down to the end of each part of the chain.

So what you need is a hierarchy of your character that is "clean". ie: doesn't have any extra objects or stuf parented to it and is basically just the main bones all linked to each other.

Starting with the hips probably, you'd have bones going down for legs, a chain parented also for the spine and head and neck all one chain, then off of the top spine teh arms etc...

So it's just a very simple staight plain old hierarchy of the "flow" of the character.

If you have that, you can run physique on the top root of that hierarchy and it will do it's thing.

Then what you would do since you obviously won't want to animate jut a straight FK hierarchy of joints, is you'd unlink them all and then relink them to their respective skeleton you already made for the real rig.

So in essence you have 2 skeletons. One is hte real rig with the controls etc...

The others are just bones that originally are linked to each other, but then are relinked onto the actual control skeleton. If you ever need to reinitialize physique you'd have to relink them back to the plain hierarchy, reinit and then relink back to the control skeleton.

The only other catch I was mentioning was that you'll need an extra bone at the "tips" of any chain. Since phyisique only goes as far as the last joint for the spline. Not the tip. If you're using bones this probably isn't an issue, but for example you MAY need to add a small tip bone at the top of the head if you see physique not create a line all the way thru the top.

[Mahlon]

michaelcomet,
that's a good explanation. I've never gotten into physique really, but that helps give me a grasp of what's going on there.

Thanks,
Mahlon Bouldin

[Stroker]

I'm kinda late to the party.

One thing that has really helped me is doing mock rigs as I go about modeling.

For example, bone and skin the arm real quick just to see how the elbow deforms. Then mess with the envelopes and weights and things. Maybe even un-skin the mock rig, move the bones a tad, then re-skin. Maybe even fix some bad geometry in the elbow.

I find that getting familiar with the mesh/rig relationship early on with the different bits-n-pieces will help with the final rig and skinning. It's also a decent break from straight-up modeling.

On a side note, I recently discovered that I was putting my hip-leg pivot point *way* too high. Man I was getting frustrated! As soon as I brought it down, though, it was all good.

[mark_battista]

thank you very much for the last post michael, it really makes sense to me now. I've had a go at what you suggested and physique, now works. So its just a case of getting skinning now. Shouldn't be a problem, I hope. Once again you are a star! Thx
regards Mark Battista

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