Skinning examples

[Tarik2d]

Hi,

I am trying to skin and rig my first character, I have a basic skinning going on at the moment but I was wondering if there are any good examples or hints and tips people may have. For example, a screen grab of the falloff along the arm on each bone. I will try post something up tonight on what I have. Also I am doing this with 3ds max 2012 sp1 CAT rig.

Cheers

[needse]

ello mate

here these might help

if ya want any more just ask

[Buzzy]

Pro Tip: Do NOT use envelopes.

While it may seem like a lot more work to manually assign weights, envelopes require tons of tweaking because they are clumsy and inaccurate, so they actually take longer.

As far as weight falloff, this just really comes with experience and experimentation. Also, joint placement is probably more important to skinning than the actual skin weights themselves. Again, something that really can't be taught, you just have to rig a bunch of characters.

[needse]

yeah look around for some tuts on how to use the weight table and bone tools

[poopipe]

Originally Posted by Buzzy

Pro Tip: Do NOT use envelopes.

While it may seem like a lot more work to manually assign weights, envelopes require tons of tweaking because they are clumsy and inaccurate, so they actually take longer.

As far as weight falloff, this just really comes with experience and experimentation. Also, joint placement is probably more important to skinning than the actual skin weights themselves. Again, something that really can't be taught, you just have to rig a bunch of characters.

^^

that.

every word of that

twice

[Tarik2d]

Needse, thanks again mate, that's helped, I think my weighting wasn't intense enough in places it needs to be.

Buzzy, thanks for the advice, I'll go for manual weighting.

Thanks guys for spending your time replying and the useful information once again.

[paulius-st]

i remember eat3d having a good tutorial on low poly character skining.
as for skining it self i would repeat what buzzy said and add suggestions to learn to use some tools like skin morph and skin wrap - they realy helps when you nead that extra kick for the skin. and dont forget the topology - clean thought out topology can save you lots of time and help make these joints bend more preciseley .

little off topic - are you starting to skin your si fi characters? is so than you could post some screengrabs how they look.

[Tarik2d]

Thanks Paulius for the hint, I'll check them out for the tutorial. Here are some drafts of the characters none of them are finished and I need to make mods to my red robot I did a while back, its not moving to fast but a little bit each month. There are some more but I don't have them on me.

[Tarik2d]

Thanks,

From your advice I think one of my problems is the placement of the CAT rig, Here I have placed it again, does this look ok? I am going to add the hands and feet. One thing that I cant seem get round is the make the foot flat on the rig, I am moving the square at the bottom and rotating the leg itself

[poopipe]

Its really hard to say without having it all in 3d.

For realtime work it generally works best if the joints are centered in the mass - even if that's not where the joint would really be (CAT makes this a bit tricky on the torso). you need to be careful about orientation at elbows/knees etc. As much as placement. You may need to alter your mesh sometimes.

When skinning make use of the grow/shrink/blend buttons on the weighting floater. i generally go through the whole mesh assigning values of 1 or 0.5 to all the verts and work on blending from there.

[Buzzy]

the "foot bone" should be thought of as the "ankle joint".
It should not be flat on the ground. It should angle downward from the ankle to the ball of the foot.

A common problem for beginner riggers is that they imagine "bones" as literal, structural, anatomical bones. This is folly. They are JOINTS. A JOINT is merely a pivot point, a virtual spot for things to rotate around. In more technical terms, it is a "transform" and nothing more. The visual "bone" part is just a visual aid so that the rig makes sense in a character's body. So, rather than trying to build a skeleton to actually fill a body with structure, you only need to place and connect a bunch of joints.

[Tarik2d]

Originally Posted by Buzzy

the "foot bone" should be thought of as the "ankle joint".
It should not be flat on the ground. It should angle downward from the ankle to the ball of the foot.

A common problem for beginner riggers is that they imagine "bones" as literal, structural, anatomical bones. This is folly. They are JOINTS. A JOINT is merely a pivot point, a virtual spot for things to rotate around. In more technical terms, it is a "transform" and nothing more. The visual "bone" part is just a visual aid so that the rig makes sense in a character's body. So, rather than trying to build a skeleton to actually fill a body with structure, you only need to place and connect a bunch of joints.

That's great advice thanks. I did notice last night after you said about it the hand bone was too far back and it caused some issues.

[Tarik2d]

When I try to load in motion capture data into the CAT rig it never loads up right and I cant get it the right scale, It is a scale factor or something from 0-100 but I cant relate that in anyway to my rig. The high of the pelvis is 8.