I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to learn the art of rigging with CAT in 3DS Max 2010. I used the biped as the basis for my rig and managed to get the skin to work pretty well, right down to the hand. I wanted to use “mirror mode” to copy all my hard work from one half of the skin to the other. Just as I was about to try this, I noticed that the rig has a custom mesh for one hand, but not for the other. When I select the hand and try to turn off the “custom mesh” tickbox, Max crashes every time. I tried taking the other route, and turning on “custom mesh” for the other hand, but this also causes Max to crash.

The skin has the following in the modifiers list:

-Meshsmooth
-Skin
-Symmetry
Editable Poly

Any suggestions would be much appreciated. I’d rather avoid having to rig the hand again, if at all possible.

Intel Q6600 2.4GHz | 4GB RAM | nVidia Quadro FX 570 | Vista Business SP1

Well I found a lot of that with CAT. Try removing the skin modifier completely and reload it again. Make sure that you same the weights before doing so you can just load them back on after the changes.

Another thing that you might want to try is just turning off Always Deform and make sure that you are on frame 1 when you make the changes.

I don’t know if this will help at all but I’m just wondering if CAT is causing problems with skin. CAT, like biped, flies in the face of Max hierarchy conventions and it caused me a whole lot of problems.

Paul Neale
PEN Productions Inc.
penproductions.ca / paulneale.com
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