CGTalk - 3dsmax adding Bones to Skin modifier after Animation

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ArnoFranzl

07-22-2008, 08:49 PM

having to rig and animate a speaking camel I did a basic rig for the head and neck and did all the basic animation first.
then I added a morph modifier to add blinking eyes and opening / closing nostrils

but then I wanted to add some extra bones for brows and lips and all of a sudden the newly to the skin modifier added bones seem to have completely different relative position to the mesh then the bones I added before the animation.

After some reading and some testing I have some kind of explanation:
Of course I animated and altered the rig on frame 0, even my reference keys that I set for an basic position at frame -1, its seems that I have set those in a position that has not been the original skinning position.

When I now press the "always deform" option in the skin modifier under "advanced parameters", the mesh and the bones get kind of separated and all the skinning I did is screwed up.
But the new bones now seem to be at that position the formerly affected when I extended their envelopes.

Question: can I set a new default state for bones and mesh so I don't loose my old rigging and can add new bones that have an influence in the area I place them?
I tried to use the "skin pose" commands but they didn't give me any satisfying results.

any help here would be wildly appreciated, as usual this happens at a time where time is an issue =)

thanks!

Illusion-shadow

07-23-2008, 01:10 PM

you always want a reference frame at frame 0, or any other frame if you choose to. But the reference pose is very importing if you want to add stuff later. One good practice to use is set skin pose when you are done rigging and save an extra copy of the rig, so you can refer back to if needed.

If you have an earlier version of the rig, key all of the controller and attributes at frame 0 and save the animation, then load the animation to your rig. (if you are using Max, make sure you check the absolute button.) Now you can set your character back to the orginal pose without losing any extra work that you did.

ForOinObjectsDoPrintName

07-25-2008, 05:28 AM

You can also make sure that the active controllers that you are setting keys on don't have offset values to start with, and are all zeroed out. You can easily getting back to your 'reference' pose by looping through the controllers, and setting the values to 0. This would be good in an rigging and animation POV.

ArnoFranzl

07-25-2008, 05:37 AM

thanks for the input,

had the luck to find a TD locking at my file and he told my the matrix values of the mesh are massively off. I guess I just didnt propperly set a default state for my mesh. I had the controllers keyed on default at -1 but in the end that just wasn't enough.
well, next time I know better... :shrug:

PEN

07-25-2008, 11:35 AM

You can also use Set Skin Pose on every thing in the rig before you start animating and or freeze transforms on all controls in the rig. This way you can always get back to the default pose. I use both on all my rigs as the Set Skin Pose is perfect for working on rigs that have been animated already.

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