Max bones and evelopes driving me mad

[3dway]

I read the help file on skin modifier to see how the envelopes work. It says that a vertex is within the absolute envelope of two bones, they share the weight based on how far into either envelope the vertex is.

I find that I can only have any vertex dedicated to any one bone/envleope.

Say I have one vertex with a bone on either side. I adjust the envelope of bone A until the vertex is 100% controlled by that bone and the mesh shows up the red colouring around it. I now select bone B and try to adjust it's envelope to control the same vertex 100%. I either cannot get bone B to control it, or when bone B has 100% control, bone A loses control.

The help file says that if the vertex is midway between bone A and bone B and absolutely controlled by each, then each bone will share control of the vertex equally. I don't find this to be the case.

I've swithched the control type from absoute to relative and either way I still can't give control to more than one bone.
I've tried painting vertex weights and still if a vertex is controlled by another bone, I can't paint it for the bone I have selected.

What do I have to do to get max to behave like the help file says it should.

What I'm actually doing here is rigging the wing on a dragon model. I have two or three verts between the fingers in the wing. I want to be able to fold up the wings without the vertecies crossing over each other. It seems to me that in order to do this, I have to have them controlled equally by the bones on either side.

[Vertigo]

You are doing it right, you are just looking at it in the wrong way.

Instead of looking at it like each bone should control it 100% and therefore the vert will be equally effected by both... look at it like how much of the vert is being effected by each bone. If 50% of the vert is being moved by bone B, and 50% by bone A, then it'll split the difference. Or it can be 60/40, or 17/83. Get it? Ther percentages of effect will ADD UP to 100.

If you vert is 100% controlled by Bone A, it isn't controlled by any other bone and therefore will only move with bone A.

Also you can have any number of bones effecting one vert, but all the percentages would add up to 100 for that one vert.

I hoped that helped clear up a little confusion. If not, well... continue staring at Max in that frustrated manner...

[3dway]

I haven't had a good chance to look at it again since I posted.

I've tried painting weights for each bone untill the verts in question were partially controlled by each. I found it strange, when a vert is fully or even mostly controlled by a different bone, you can't paint it. It doesn't change, or at least the blue/yellow/red indication of vertex weight doesn't change. Not gradually.

I had one if those "must have dreamed it" brain storms this moring and thought to try painting weights with two bones selected. Sadly you cannot select two bones under sub object envelopes in the skin modifier.

I'm about to resort to the brute force approach, turn on vertex numbers, find the verts in the weight table and see if I can figure it out that way, but I'm afraid that it will take too much knowledge along scripting or programming lines to be be able to make sense of it that way.

[Vertigo]

yeah, its hard for me to say exactly what the problem is without being there, peeking over you shoulder. I can say though, that on my computer the shading showing effect one bone has on the vertices gets screwed up a lot. I never knew if it was my graphics card or max or what was causing this problem. So, while the gradation wasn't changing as I played with the envelopes, the actual effect on the vertices was changing. You may want to see if you have the same thing going on.

Usually when I skin characters I try to get what I can done with envelope tweaking first, but then I always have to go in vert by vert to to tweak them out. Then, if that still isn't fixing it I'll go in and do the Moiph angle deformer.

I hope you get this all working, skinning is a big enough pain the butt without having these sorts of problems

[3dway]

any tutorials on the morph angle deformer or joint deformers that you know of.

The help file has some stuff, just shows that you can go in and edit curves.

This isn't the sort of thing that you usually see tutorials on.