Tutorial on Rigging Characters in Max?
Community Forums/Developer Stations/Tutorial on Rigging Characters in Max?
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| Well since we have vertex weights, it's finally worth me learning how to rig a character properly. We have more talented artists around here than ever before, so I'm hoping one of you guys can point me to a tutorial or two showing me how to rig a character properly with envelopes instead of just drag-selecting a bunch of vertices and giving them a weight of 1.0 as I have been up till now. I think UU will deal with Physique as well as Skin, so either is good, though I'm more familiar with SKin. |
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| actually thats the best way to do it. go around the whole mesh drag-selecting a bunch of vertices and giving them a weight of 1.0. where the deformations occur, like elbows, asssign them say a weight of 0.5, lower and upper arm. so basically you only need weighting where the deformations are. i would forget the envelopes, my way is easier and I learned it in th industry, so i am not just blowing hot air I will dig put a proper tut soon. i did see a good one recently |
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| Guys, Sounds like something to look forward to Ruz. What I need is a best method tutorial on how to rig a character and then one on how to ustilise the 1.86 weights properly from within B3d. Any help in both areas would be greatly welcomed. IPete2. |
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| Sounds good, Ruz, thanks. It's good to know that the drag-select and type-in method is good for weighting too, because I've never got on with envelopes and always found the drag-select method so much easier. |
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| yup. this method works fine for characters of up to to around 3000 polys. when the mesh gets too dense, it gets harder to select the areas you want, so envelopes might be a better approach here. if you just do it the normal way( drag select), then animate him running , you can see the areas that will need weighting. or you couild just bend the limbs one by one and correct the bad deformation where it is needed. I stress here whats more important is how you build the mesh. my redbron character deforms quite well, even without weighting. And even with weighting, if the model is built incorrectly it will look pretty bad. so to recap we are kind of weighting it as though here are no weights ie weight of '1' , but then refining/weighting the bits that deform badly. line of verts around elbow would be 0.5 for example,which translates to 0.5 to the upper arm, 0.5 to the lower arm. obviously you will tweak the weights , this is just an example if anyone has any specific probs, give me a shout |
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| I don't like using envelopes either. You don't have very much control, and areas where the envelopes overlap like the insides of the legs can be a pain. Note that one of the main reasons I prefer animating in Maya is because of it's character rigging tools. You can paint vertex weights with Maya's built-in functionality, a process which is faster and more intuitive than directly selecting vertices and which gives much more control than envelopes. |
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| I also like skin's manual vertex assignement compared to 'physique's vertex assignement, but if you ever do 3k poly models, I would recommend using physique any day, since it's envelope tools are far better then skin'sz and at the end, use vertex assignement to tweak small problems. |
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| I still like skin better these days and would say up to 5000 polys you are ok. epends what you are doing though really. i don't mind using either. skins load and save envelopes system seems a little fragile though. Also some good advice is to place an edit mesh modifier and an unwrap uv edit modifier in the stack , so you can tweak 'below' the skin modifier if anything needs changing. |
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| i like to assign vertices individually, hate using envelope. I will mass assign vertices around the bicep then neaten the ones around the shoulder and elbow manually to get best results. |
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| yup thats the best way IMHO painting weights is just too hard to control, its best to have vertex by vertex control, over your weights. if you have a 60,000 poly character thats a different matter. you can weight the lower poly version and apply meshsmooth or subdivide it , so when you animate/weight the low poy mesh, this in turn animates/weights the higher poly version. works great, very smooth maya's 'wrap' does something similar. |
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