how do I do weighting in 3ds max?

[Bonafide]

Currently I can transfer clothes from 1 type of body to another, even from Oblivion to Fallout 3. However, in game the weights are completely wrong, the clothes will clip the body, stretch in odd ways, etc..

 

I know whats wrong, its the clothes weights, how do I do weights in 3ds so the clothes follow the body correctly?

 

Thanks.

[Baelkin]

If you apply a skin modifier to the mesh and setup the skin correctly, you can edit the vertex weights of a model. Getting good deformation however is a bit tricky however and takes quite a bit of trial and error before you get a perfect result. Check Google for skinning/rigging tutorials, it's basically the same you need to do when rigging for Fallout 3.

[baduk]

I would not recommend weight painting the entire outfit if that is what you are suggesting.

 

I use blender, and there is a python script called bone weight copy that is used to weight clothing when an existing mesh (the body) is already fully weighted. It is very good, and I only have to do a small amount of manual weight painting and sometimes using a proxy mesh to get excellent results.

 

in 3dsMax there must be a similar function to copy existing skin data to a new object.

[Skree000]

In max, you can apply a Skin Wrap to an existing skinned mesh to make additions to its skin mod. Additionally you can alter the geometry by applying editable poly modifiers, making your changes, then dropping the editable poly modifier down below the skin modifier, and hit 'Collapse TO' on that, which will Upwards-collapse the geometry into it, without wiping out your Skin modifier.

 

Max is a PITA for skinning if you arent 100% sure what you are doing, there is a 99% chance you will screw something up, so make sure you back up the file often in iterations so you can go back at any point and resume what you were doingl.

 

Before you do ANY skin mods to a skinned mesh in max, take the bones and move them around and set keyframes in different stretch positions in your slider bar, and scrub through the animation often so you can see in realtime if your skin-changes are making things better, or worse.

 

Ideally your 'neutral pose' is saved at Frame -1. then track your timeline across so the -1 frame goes off the bar, so it cannot be touched. Be VERY careful.

 

Skin modifiers are like a house of cards. Without special care it all falls apart. There is no 'easy button' in max, just hard, painful work, looking at each and every vertex. You can paint weights liberally and/or use envelopes to get general shapes skinned okay, but in the end you will always have to get down and dirty with the vertices.

 

 

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Okay assuming you seriously want to do this, import your fallout3 skeleton.nif into max and save that as a seperate file.

Import your armor into that file on top of your skeleton, it will automatically reference the skelly to the skin of the mesh.

 

As stated above, to see how the skin reacts to different bone rotations, use the rotate tool along with various points on the time slider, and Set Keys for the bones in various rotations (just dont change the neutral pose, youll need to go back to that for exporting).

 

You will see right before your eyes if things get clippy or distorted at this point.

 

To modify the weighting, in the Skin Modifier, click Edit Envelopes, then check off 'Vertices [ ]' Then click the little Wrench icon, this is your vertex weighting toolbox. It will allow you to see what vertices are influenced by what bones, and to fix any problems.

 

Also handy near the end is to open your Vertex tree and 'remove all zero weights' since those are useless.

[junin]

LOL, did you get all that? Now are you sure you still want to mess around with rigging and weights? If so, here is my advice to you, (the only thing I can add to what skree said) don't give up, it can be very frustrating, but if you keep at it you will get better. Good luck.

[baduk]

I have a couple of advices for you to help.

BWC in blender is great but you would have to do manual rigging anyway if you wanted to do skirts or other such difficult items.

 

It may be harder to get a minimum acceptable result with weight painting than it is to get the same in other areas of 3d creation, but i think getting an excellent texture or mesh is no less and often more difficult than getting an excellent rigging.

 

You must use skeleton.nif to pose with or you are going to be working blind.

 

Look for an x mirroring button so that weight changes are applied the same across body symmetry.

 

Its good to maintain tension on each vertex between the bones. If you have a vertex jumping an abnormally long distance when you change a value then raise the weighting on all the bones affecting that vertex.

 

I think that it is generally good to go for a smooth gradient of weightings.

 

I do not recommend exporting with skeleton.nif. It may cause gaps to appear at the neck and wrists. extract a vanilla body model from the bsa and import the armature instead.