Is there some tricks around setting up the envelopes in 3ds MAX so you almost not have to do any manual skin painting ? I was thinking of using the standard biped with some extra bones. any pointers in this area are welcome
i am new to max but my workflow that i’ve been pretty happy with thus far is to have a base mesh that you hand weight. it should be a pretty average mesh - maybe a base mesh that all other meshes are derived from or something.
i weight that until i’m happy, and then for all new meshes, i use the original base to drive a skin wrap modifier. maybe play with the settings on the skin wrap for a minute, and then convert that to a skin modifier. i’ve been happy with the results i’ve been getting, they require little touchup, and the ability to convert skin wrap to skin is a lifesaver since that’s what gets exported to the game.
Same as Jeremy. Weight one by hand (in my case, mostly by using the Weight Tools to assign values since I’m working on low res models). Then use that to drive any other similar models with Skin Wrap and collapse back to Skin. Skin Wrap saves loads of time. I never bother with envelopes, they don’t really save any time over just weighting by hand.
Yeah, Skin Wrap saves loads of time.
Generally though, the biggest time saver has been my custom weight tool. It is basically a Weight Tool that is customized for my workflow and I can add new macros and tools into easily. Manual skin weighting becomes a breeze. Actually I don’t even bother with Skin Wrap anymore except where the mesh needs to match the underlying skinning (such as with layers of clothing)… weighting ‘regular’ geometry is so fast, and I just use a combination of hand-weighting and weight painting on ‘irregular’ geometry.
I rarely use envelopes- only sometimes if I need to weight a soft, regular plane like a sheet of cloth, or sometimes for something like a big bushy beard.
I never use envelopes when weighting. Some time ago, I started to use the weight table. Lots of numbers but quite useful for dealing with large areas. Nowadays I have some skinning commands attached to the NumPad and, wow, one of the best ideas I’ve ever had! It saves me a lot when skinning.
First, I assign all the vertices that are close enough to a bone, and hit NumPad 0, for giving them a value of 1. If you’re concentrated enough and no animator stops from your duty (hehehehe), you can have all the mesh weighted in this way in less than an hour. Then, you start to deal with the joints and with gradients between weights.
Another useful thing I’ve learnt is to use an animation that rotates/tweaks all the animatable limbs and controls. Not at the same time, but one axis per time and per object. So I only use the mouse for selecting vertices (if the model has good edge-flow, selecting is faster using the ‘Loop’ command -also attached to the NumPad in my case).
A command I’m starting to use more and more is ‘Blend’, for (obviously) blending between two or more influences. For some areas it comes in handy.
I rarely use weight-painting, only with irregular objects, as Rob said.
Hope it helps a little 
thanks a lot for all the answers and skinwrap from a base model is something I have done at work quite a lot. I was starting on a personal project at home and was thinking that if i have a more free limit when it comes to amount of bones I can use how would I place these extra bones ? maybe in this way i can get a skeleton which is extremely fast to skin to and deforms well. as little weightpainting as possible. When I ad a skin modifier and ad some bones in MAX I get very sharp transitions between bones and that was the area that I thought could be tweaked with envelopes. But thanks to ikerCLoN I will use the the blend function in the weight tool in the future. I still think that I do the final touches with blendshapes.
the projects is towards a pretty high res animation.
placement of the extra bones and what kind of controllers I should assign to them is where I am at right now. what I need on top of the ordinary max biped so to speak.
Ah, twist bones and muscle bones. Haven’t really used many myself. Our characters have tended to be very basic really so far. The most I’ve really done is add an extra dummy constrained to the upper arm and clavicle to ease the crunching you can get around the shoulder.
Paul Neale’s Intermediate Rigging Series of DVDs covers that stuff very nicely.
Disc 2 deals with arms which covers twist bones with constraints.
Disc 3 deals with skinning which covers muscle bones to ease deformation.
One important thing I learnt from that series is that you’ll never be able to fix up poor skinning with corrective morphs. It’s best to get the deformation as spot on as you can before going anywhere near any correcting morphs.
We never ever use weights unless we really need to… we very much like envelopes for it’s ease of use and the flexibility of remodelling everything from scratch if needed. If some place is a bit hard to single out we preferably add another bone to get and envelope in the right area then weight it by hand. We’re not in games so our models differ quite a lot, and where pretty happy with the results thus far… Maybe some day we’ll look into manually weighting.
-Johan
robinb I will get the dvd pack with paul on tuesday hopefully so until then I let the project rest 
thanks jhn for your answer
[QUOTE=Rob Galanakis;1889]Yeah, Skin Wrap saves loads of time.
Generally though, the biggest time saver has been my custom weight tool. It is basically a Weight Tool that is customized for my workflow and I can add new macros and tools into easily. Manual skin weighting becomes a breeze. Actually I don’t even bother with Skin Wrap anymore except where the mesh needs to match the underlying skinning (such as with layers of clothing)… weighting ‘regular’ geometry is so fast, and I just use a combination of hand-weighting and weight painting on ‘irregular’ geometry.
I rarely use envelopes- only sometimes if I need to weight a soft, regular plane like a sheet of cloth, or sometimes for something like a big bushy beard.[/QUOTE]
So, Rob… Are you making this excellent tool available?
Are you willing to share it? I hope so!
Mike
I have to agree with Rob - I never use envelopes and find it much quicker to take the default skin weights and hand weight. With several hundred in game characters we tend to use the exact same hands and very similar joint positions, so skinwrapping is a great way to get 75% there in a matter of minutes.
Again, we’ve got tools that we developed alongside our workflow for adding skin and populating bones, with a palette of brushes sizes of weights.
[QUOTE=Apparition;3378]So, Rob… Are you making this excellent tool available?
Are you willing to share it? I hope so!
Mike[/QUOTE]
I’d like to but legal issues prevent it. I’ll see what I can do, though, but there are bigger fish I’d like to fry for public distro projects.
I agree with those who prefer to hand weight over envelopes. I even avoid envelopes when I need to do soft rigging for cloth, though I do set my bones up so that the auto-weighting that skin does gets me mostly there.
In some cases, I try to create a low-poly (as in, one poly ring per bone) version of whatever I’m weighting, use tools to auto-weight to my bones, and then use skin wrap to transfer the weights to my high-poly mesh, and tweak from there.
The main issue with skin wrap is that it’s done in global space, so verts that overlap into another bone’s space need to be tweaked by hand.
I also agree with Rob in regards to having a custom toolbox for doing weighting. It’s great to have all the shortcuts and little things I write at my fingertips to speed up the process.
I usually use the script “Skin Or Die” In Max for manually skining. Works great!
I have found this to be a trade off. In general, weighing with envelopes is much more tedious. For one-off characters I never bother because I can hand weigh the verts so quickly in comparison. However, if we have a number of characters which use the same rig, or proportionally similar rigs, then the extra time spent on a good envelope solution is very easily transferrable because now the weights are volume based as opposed to vertex-number based - this can be very valuable in some situations.
Not exactly related, but what are you most common Max skinning helper scripts?
Some of favourites:
- Select Zero Weight Vertices
- Set All Envelopes to Zero
- Remove Multiple Bones Dialog (which is actually a part of SkinOps but not in the UI…
We’re still at Max 9 (long projects and all that and the upgrade was never that smooth so we didn’t upgrade… :), so I don’t know that well if Autodesk has actually improved anything in the Skin stuff recently…
SamiV.