step4

one trick I always use is to make the bones transparent, this way you can still move them but  now you can see the entire mesh clearly without hiding the bones every time you want to tweak.

This is also handy when you want to animate your character, this way it becomes much more clear what the character is actually doing and how it looks like.

 

select all the bones>bring up the material editor (press m)>assign a material to the bones> put the opacity to 0

 

Now lets put biped in a funky pose so that is becomes clear where the skinning is going wrong.

Please not that i will not show you how to tweak each individual bone, but I will show you some ways to improve

your skinning, after which it should be clear how to sking each bone. Otherwise this tutorial would become

to long and unclear.

first off lets tweak the envelopes.

select mesh>modifier panel>expand the physique rollout>envelope>select a bone to see and be able to tweak its envelope

 

 

These are basically balloons around the bones, everything within the range of thise balloon will

be assigned to that bone(with a certain value, increasing the strenght will increase the power that that balloon has over the vertexes).

 

there are multiple ways of adjusting these envelopes;

1.simply scaling them (in link mode)

2.through their control points (basically selecting the vertexes of the envelope)

3.through the sections (bascially selecting the edges of the envelope)

 

 

when adjusting the envelopes, its probably a good idea to start with the spine. since these affect the most bones.

So now just adjust these envelopes to the best you can, remember you only have to do one side.

when you are happy with the envelopes, copy them over to the other side;

select an envelope>press copy> select the "same" envelop on the other side> press copy

 

 

now we go into more detail with vertex assignment;

simply choose vertex from the physique rollout.

 

This is where you can really begin to tweak the small errors in your rig.

1.click select to select the vertexes of your mesh you wish to assign or remove from certain bones

2.click the "assign to link" or "remove from link" button

3.click on the bone you wish to remove this vertex or add this vertex to

(important thing to know, vertexes that are blue are unassigned( red ones have a deformable envelope on them, green ones have a rigid envelope on them)).

 

 

As you can see its a good idea to keep posing him differently to see where things are still going wrong. it might be an idea to make a simple animation of this,

which you could use everytime you are rigging to see where it go's wrong.

and lastly you can work with morph targets;

 

as you might have noticed the hip area is a really hard area to rig. When rotating the upperleg forward or backward, you will most

likely get some deformation that is still going wrong. Somethimes this just cant be fixed through the techniques explained earlier.

But this technique will solve those problems.

 

the way this works:

You basically remodel parts of the mesh. 3dsmax saves this as a value, for example  0 = use 0% of the remodelled vertexes and         100= use 100% of the remodelled vertexes.

Then you assign this to the rotation of a bone. you can for example tell 3dsmax to use 100% of the remodelled vertexes when the upperleg is rotated 45 degrees and to use 0% when

the leg is rotated 0 degrees. this can ofcourse be any amount you chose.

let's start.

 

1.first off put you character back into the standard pose by going in and out of figure mode.

2.make a small animation of the bone you wish to fix the skinning on. i chose the left upper leg in this example.

-select the bone

-turn on auto key

-right click the time slider in frame 0

-the "create key" window will pop up, press ok

-move to frame 10(or any frame), and rotate the bone into the "problem area" . into the position you want to fix.

-turn off autokey

 

3.add a skin morph modifier

4.add the bone (the pose the bone is in when added, is used as the starting point. thus meaning for 3dsmax 0degrees)

So make sure he is on frame 0.

 

5.now move to the end frame of your ''animation"

6. select the bone and click "create morph" .

7.no we need to make sure that the morph is at 0 when we are in the starting position(make sure you are in frame 0, or the position you want as the 0 value).

again 0= 0% influence of the remodelled parts(remodelling will be done later on)  and 100= 100% influence of the remodelled parts.

so we want to tell 3ds max, when you are in this basic pose, dont use the remodelled parts(0%). but when we are at "this" degree of rotation, use 100% (and 3dmax interpolates everything in between).

the way to do is to increase or decrease the influence angle. standard it is set at 90 degrees. so if your rotation is also 90 degrees there should be no problem.

but ofcourse most of the time it is something else, so tweak this value untill your morph remains at 0 (seen in the parameters rollout).

 

8.now move to the 100.0 morph position. (which is when your bone is rotated to a certain position)

9. now press "edit" (all the orange edges are within the unfluence of this bone)

10. simply re-model the problem area as you see fit.

Now everytime your leg gets up to this rotation, it uses 100% of this remodelling, thus fixing your former skinning issues.

and when your leg is in its standaart position it uses 0% of this remodelling, so that stays the same.

and everything in betwen is simply interpolated. (it is however possible to edit at, for example, 50.0 morph as well)

 

11. now just test if it works alright. go out of edit mode. select the bone and just rotate it to see the deformation.

side note: Try to get seperate morphs for the different axis. otherwise they will influence each other and this can cause problems..

 

 

 

Hope this was usefull and have fun rigging/animating ;)

 

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