A way to combine Skin modifiers into one?

[Madcat221]

I'm attempting to modify the Werewolf mesh in Skyrim. However, there's a problem in tweeking the skin modifiers: the body (excluding head pieces) is in two NiTriShapes, with really uneven edges between them. I've been fixing seams as they appear in my tweekings with vertex snapping.

 

Is there any way to combine these two pieces into one mesh, separated by material IDs for export, so I can tweek the skin modifier for both?

 

I'm in Max 2010, BTW.

[drywater509]

There is a script under the utilities panel called SkinUtilities. All the weight information is baked into a copy of the model; create a bake for each model and then add them into one mesh as elements, for both the originals, and the baked versions. You can then take the baked version and reapply the skinning to bones so you end up one one model to export. Look at a tutorial first its fairly confusing and can cause weird deformations if not done properly.

[Ghogiel]

 

Is there any way to combine these two pieces into one mesh, separated by material IDs for export, so I can tweek the skin modifier for both?

 

Use skin utilities like suggested. but having multiple material IDs will probably crash on export, it doesn't seem to work with the Dismemberskin modifier. So once you import the skin weights using skin utilities into one mesh and are ready for export, clone the mesh, and on one delete the head leaving the body, and on the clone delete the body leaving the head.

Edited January 27, 2012 by Ghogiel

[jimhsu]

Just figured this out today: if you're using skinutilities and are trying to deform your base mesh (for example, if you exported a skin, collapsed, and are working in Edit Poly), you can simply copy and paste the Edit Poly modifier onto the SkinUtilities mesh so that it ends up perfectly matching your deformed mesh. This works as long as the base mesh is the same and you copied all the modifiers you're making in deform onto the Skinutilities mesh (you can then go ahead and collapse the mesh you're working on to Editable Mesh before importing the skin weights). Can save a whole lot of frustration.

 

Oh, and also SkinUtilities in Max 2012 always crashes my computer. Between the ****ed up UV edit functionality and random crashes in 2012, all I can conclude is that it's a piece of junk and thus I do all work in 2011.

Edited March 1, 2012 by jimhsu

[Ghogiel]

I've even conform mesh on it to shrink wrap it to a completely different mesh and tried to see how much better a start for skinning that is instead of trying skin wrap. essential kit imo, and if it was bugging out for me I would be pissed off as well.