Problems with Skin Modifier and Painting Weights in Max5

[BREK]

Hello people.

I have a problem. :(

I have applied my Skin modifier, and my model has muscles that do not fit within the Envelopes. It'd be sooo much easier if I could just Non-Uniform sca;e the envelopes, but NOOOO! We ain't allowed to.

Sooo, I have to resort to painting the weights in.
Problems started happening of course.

First off, when attempting to paint the weights, it always painted on the furthest away surface of the model, not on the closest side as it should do.

To get round this I flipped the normals so the model faced inwards. I can now paint the surface closest to me, but it's the inside of the surface, so I can't see the effect of the painted weights now.

I thought maybe this had to do with the Normals in Max5 so I checked use Legacy R4 normals, but this does nothing.


Can anyone Help.????
All i want is to be able to paint the normals on the correct surface. The painter seems to choose the opposite side of the surface than what it should do.

Cheers for your help.

[Jenn]

I've had that problem before. Personally, I don't use the paint weights option at all. I just manually select the verts and enter the weight for them. For me it's much faster than fiddling with the paint weights option which I find slow and clunky.

[BREK]

How did u fix it.?


Yeah, looks like I'm going to have to do that.
You don't happen to know if u can ignore backfacing vertecies in the skin modifier mode.? I want to select verts on the left leg, but it selects the verts on the right leg too. So I have to rotate the model and de-select them, verts.
If you don't then that don't matter much. I'm just trying to find out how to make the whole process faster.

I have a wacom tablet and you can turn on the weight strength to be linked to the pressure of the pen. I was trying to do it that way because it would be quite fast to do. Unfortunately strange things are going on. :(

Ooooohhh! any idea how to change the shape of the cross sections.? Someone was saying you can non-uniform scale them.. sooo that maens you can make them into ovals and so on.
Although I'm not sure if it's possible as the scale buttons are greyed out.

U got any idea how to do that.?

Sorry for all the questions, but it'd be great if u could answer some of them, or if u dunno just say I dunno. It would help me a lot. And would save me spending hours searching for ways to do something that isn't possible. :)

Cheers.

[kuman]

painting definitely is slow and clunky. what i do is paint something rough and then like jen said go back and manually fix my vert weights.

in low poly or fairly low poly i won't paint at all but sometimes my meshes get too heavy to do like that.

as for what you're asking. n.uniform scale, i assume in your instance, is to do two things. either increase the envelopes length of its width. well if you look at skin envelopes there's a center edge with two nodes surouned by rings with 4 nodes each. probably two rings. if you grab that center node you can move it around to modifiy its length. and then you can select the ring nodes and in the mod pannel change their radius. this should accomodate the two things that nu scale do.

also i've found that if its possible to use, joint angle deformers really help a lot. they go a long way in terms of saving you time. its just faster and better to use some of them than it is to edit sets of verts at a joint.

another tip is to check out chuggnut's script - skintools. there was just a new version released this last week i think. got some cool stuff in there. check out his uv unwrap script additions as well. good stuff there.

good luck

-k

[Jenn]

Unless the skin tools script Kuman mentioned has a function to ignore back faces it doesn't exist. The Skin modifier still needs work imho and a lot of people have been requesting for Skin to really be updated...only time will tell. Once you get used to selecting and deselecting vertices by hand it goes really fast.

Concerning the paint weights issue, have you tried going into the paint weight options and checking or unchecking the mirror option?

[BREK]

Thanks for the Reply's. :)

I'm aware of being able to alter the length of the envelope and adjust the radius of the cross sections. But this still keeps the cross section as a circular shape. I was wanting to squish and streatch the actual cross section. Ideally I'd want to be able to use splines as the cross sections. But anyway as I thought it looks like it is NOT possible to do that, or people would have said how to do it instead of saying u can alter the length.

I'm going to use the Joint angle Deformers and Bulge modifiers after I have sorted out the basic skin weighting.

Yes I have tried the Mirror on and off. :) I suppose I could turn the mirror on and paint then turn the furthest away surface weights back to 0. Normally making the maxmum weight as 0 on the brush allows you to paint them back to 0, but even this doesn't seem to work at the moment. Additive on or off it still don't work. :(

I'll have a look at the Skintools u suggested. See if there is anything good for me to use.

:) I'd agreee with you. The Skin Modifier is drastically lacking compared to some areas of max. I wouldn't mind so much if it worked normally for me.

Anyway, cheers for the help u guys. :)