3d max bone weighting tutorial
A; Adding a skin modifier.
Select your model in the perspective window.
1/2;Select a skin modifier from the drop down window.
3;click F3 (on your keyboard) to view model rigging.
B; Adding bones.
4;Select skin modifier in the stack.
5;Select Edit envelopes.
6;Add bones, a window will pop up with a list of bones.
7;Select all bones from head to torso (hold down shift) ((you don't need the abs bone) .. and select them..
Note; The bones may not always come up in the order you see here, holding down Ctrl allows you to select them individually.
C; Weighting the vertices.
8;tick the vertices box.
(Note; all unweighed vertices should light up, in my case yellow)
9;Select the head bone.
10;Select all the vertices in the head.
Note;select vertices by dragging your cursor over them in the perspective window, you can select multiple vertices by holding down your Shift key, or subtract select vertices by holding down the Alt key.
11;Scroll down to Abs. Effect, double click here, type 0, double click again, type 1
That's the way I weight bones, double clicking might seem odd but it works and it's a dam sight quicker than using the weight table.
Repeat the process for all bones, I'm not going to explain exactly where the cut off's for every bone are you should be able to work it out from here, if not, trail and error.
Tip; sometimes the vertices highlight switches off, I don't know why, but, if you click on the pink ball in the centre of the move gizmo they should come back on.
Tip; Cloaks .. the same process but (*7) add the cloak bones and the torso bone only, weight the cloak bottom/middle/top and then where it goes over the shoulders weight it to the torso.
Tip; If your editing an existing model and need to simply move a few vertex around copy the skin modifier and then dump it in the trash, when you edited the model paste the skin modifier back in. Easily done by right clicking over the skin modifier/copy, then right clicking over Editable poly/paste.
When your done export the model, it's a good idea to import it back in at this point to check any problems that might have occurred when exporting, this is also when you might want to take shots for unit cards..
Other tutorials which are useful for unit creation.
Equipment swapping, see here.
Rendering images for UI cards, see here.
and here.
UV mapping, see here.
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