Tutorial: 3ds Max Skinned Meshes Into Game

[CanisRex84]

yes and don't forget after to remove zero vertices , at least I do it all time at 0.01 after setting to 4 bones as I told you befoure and you correctly showed in the picture ....the morphing I use always the same model as base to not get any weird morphing errors on the vertices .... so Use Lattice modifiers and soft selection on vertexes when moving them around to match the desired shape ...the export settings look fine , when you import it is on what you need if either import the skeleton or not , I usually do import the whole skeleton then work on the skin modifier selecting the needed bones and remove unneeded ones after that itt's on the export where you can remove the extra bones unused ...

 

Thanks for the confirmation..

 

I've been using a Skin Wrap modifier to get my skin info, I was working with a mesh that consisted of 2 or 3 separate objects, I.e. Arms and legs from one armour and the torso from another.. I guess I ran into a few problems trying to use Skin Wrap on these add it would have added extra bones.. But I thought on export you can remove extra bones? It didnt seem to work for me, they were still in the skin info..

 

I tried out a lattice modifier, but I couldnt change it back afterwards!!.. It chopped my mesh up into a... well... a lattice, like a net, and it was useless afterwards. So I guess I was doin something terribly wrong with that as well..

 

Like you said, I have used a clone of the exact same model to do my morph modifier, but Im gonna have to re-read Ghogiels posts on using snapshots/clones.. Im not really following this advice.. Not cos I dont want to, only cos I dont really understand that process and how to do it..

 

Getting there though, then no one will stop me from making my armours.. :thumbsup:

[PrometheusTS]

U do not need to make a clone , just save it as _0 or _1 according to what shape are u working upon and save it as backup then directly work on the same one , refitting the armor or clothing to the base shape model of vanilla or the one u like for the _0 or _1 u need ...

 

 

as for the lattice it is a helper modofier , it creates a cage of vertices aroundthe selected vertices in the mesh , if you use the soft selection enabled , you can push pull parts of the armor or clothing around the body to make it match the shape better , simply moving around the cage vertices , if this is not enough precise you can go in the mesh ( use an edit poly modifier to work better over the stack ) and push the vertices always with soft selection ....

 

This is what I do , couse I do not trust much how the morphing work with the morp targets or the somuchmonster plugin , because they stretch too much certain areas of the armor or clothing I work on usually and the result is a messed shape expepcially true for complex stuff ...

[Ghogiel]

 

I tried out a lattice modifier, but I couldnt change it back afterwards!!.. It chopped my mesh up into a... well... a lattice, like a net, and it was useless afterwards. So I guess I was doin something terribly wrong with that as well..

 

He doesn't mean the actual lattice modifier. He is mixing 3ds max terms with blender terms. What he is advocating is the free form deformation modifiers, ie FFD3x3x3 etc, this is what the lattice modifier in blender is. The actual lattice modifier in max does exactly what you described, so you were using it right, it's just not the tool for the job.

 

He's right though, best way to make the morph target is to do it by hand, automagic deformer is going to warp complex objects in often not the best ways, so even if you used somuchmorpher you are going to want to go back into an edit poly to fix a lot of it by hand anyway. I think it is worth using at least to give a rough idea on where to go with hand editing it and what not to do. So I'd use it even if its output never made it anywhere near my final models.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Ghogiel

[AlphaWoIF]

Hi guys i already asked this in another forum but it could take a long time for an answer :(

 

Say i have a mesh thats already rigged with a bone structure that i plan to port to skyrim which im more than capable of doing already, but instead of going through the whole manual rigging process to get it moving as nice as the original one did , Is it at all possible to take the bone / envelope / Weight data from the original model and apply it to a similar bones on a skeleton.nilf once i have rigged a copy of the mesh to it

 

I have already tried to to do this by renaming the bones in the original model to the same as the skeleton.nilf, bone names and saving and loading the envelopes data from the original back to the mesh once its rigged to the skeleton.nilf with the hope that it would just apply it and overwite the same bone name with the originals weights data .

 

short story it didnt work infact it unrigged the mesh?.

 

if this is possible it would save me a lot of time as i have lots of sets to port , and would be a great tool for future modding but what steps would i take?,

thanks

Edited April 7, 2012 by AlphaWoIF

[Ghogiel]

Renaming of bones is what I did. Worked for me.

 

I renamed the bones. made a new bind pose for the skeleton to more closely match the skyrim rig. cloned the mesh. used skin utilities to extract skin data to mesh. deleted the skeleton (oblivion one that I had renamed bones). Imported skyrim skeleton. tweaked the clone to fit the skyrim skeleton as best as possible. Then on the other clone, which is still in the original position, matching the mesh I extracted skin weights to, I added a skin and all the bones, used skin utilities to import the weights. And since the 2 meshes are identical you can just copy and paste the skin modifier onto the mesh that you had positioned correctly.

Edited April 7, 2012 by Ghogiel

[AlphaWoIF]

Renaming of bones is what I did. Worked for me.

 

I renamed the bones. made a new bind pose for the skeleton to more closely match the skyrim rig. cloned the mesh. used skin utilities to extract skin data to mesh. deleted the skeleton (oblivion one that I had renamed bones). Imported skyrim skeleton. tweaked the clone to fit the skyrim skeleton as best as possible. Then on the other clone, which is still in the original position, matching the mesh I extracted skin weights to, I added a skin and all the bones, used skin utilities to import the weights. And since the 2 meshes are identical you can just copy and paste the skin modifier onto the mesh that you had positioned correctly.

does it matter if the model im trying to get the data from is nothing to do with gamebryo . its just normal bones or sometimes square or diamond shaped ones.

skin utilities is new to me i will have to look up info as ive only just started using skin wrap. since then its all been selecting all the verts in the skyrim mesh by hitting ctrl A ,then attaching it to mesh i want to rig then hitting delete to remove skyrim mesh, then it was manual work from there onwards, i learned how to rig like that from a gta4 tutorial to me it seems like a dirty shortcut but its always worked quite well.

but now i dont see the point in me rigging a new mesh if there is a chance i could use the originals data to make it even better.

some might not think it from my modded stuff but i guess you always feel like a max noob :)

Edited April 7, 2012 by AlphaWoIF

[Ghogiel]

skin is skin and bones are bones, so no it doesn't matter about external game engines.

[AlphaWoIF]

skin is skin and bones are bones, so no it doesn't matter about external game engines.

 

thanks for you help Ghogiel it took me a while to understand and learn these new tricks but the skin wrap and the importing skin data has cut my rigging in half .

im very pleased with what i can do now and the results were better than expected.

kudos :)

Edited April 8, 2012 by AlphaWoIF

[AlphaWoIF]

I have a question ,not sure if this has been answered before but after i do the skinwrap & select a similar model that's perfectly aligned

and then test it by moving the arms, it all moves as i wanted but for some reason after i convert to skin and delete the skinwrap modifier then move the arms i keep getting a problem with a left elbow joint where as i move the arm down the mesh in that area is rapidly collapsing and opening again, like it was caught in a wind tunnel. any ideas what could cause that?

[PrometheusTS]

Hi I was trying to create a new creatre but I am having some problems I hope someone can help me figure it out ...

I took a model and reskinned over the troll skeleton , I duplicated all the troll's CK stuff and when I had to put the model in the place of the old troll nif the CK gets stuck in a forever circle loading and with a Stung! sound ... I have to quit the CK couse looks frozen ... what can be the cause of this problem ? the model is using the same skeleton and rig , but is split into more pieces than the actual model , but what can be the problem?

 

The creature is composed of 10 pieces , but when I try to put in the window in CK it says there is a problem or error BSshader etc ... but actually there is no problem in the Niftools view , the shader is simple and just 2 textures and anyway copied from the original troll one ...

 

 

http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/7227/trolljy.jpg