While I’m not too busy I thought I would have a go at improving my skinning skills, something I still find difficult to do well sometimes. I finaly got around to trying out the Skin Morph modifier, I can’t believe I have ignored it for so long. There is a bit of work pulling vertices about, but it seems to work well so far. Worth the effort when comparead to the endless fidling with envelopes and vertex weights for often sub standard results.
I animated a biped going through lots of poses, moving every joint for the setting up of the skin. I did a quick rough job with the envelopes to get them something like, to then use skin morph to refine those tricky areas. I used the Paste Mirror function on the limb bones to copy the morphs to the other side, it works, that’s no problem. But how about the central bones like spines and head? I want to mirror thes morphs, but the Paste Mirror works on a per bone basis, you can’t copy a mirrored version of a morph back onto the same bone for the opposite motion, Eg, the head or upper body turns to the right, then to the left, I set up a morph for the right turn, then want to duplicate that (mirrored) to the left turn. I don’t see a way to do it, or is there something I’m missing.
The workaround I have used,which does appear to work is using a technique similar to that described in this tutorial to create an External Mesh Target for the opposite morph from the first morph.
I just wondered if there is a simpler way to do this. It would save a lot of time and effort and give a more consistant, symetrical skinning solution.

Well first off I would always use external meshes with the skin morph modifier as you can then use all the poly tools to edit the shapes that you need and are not stuck with the simple editing tools that are built into skin morph.

For that reason I will just use either the mirror morph tool that is built into Max 2010 (But doesn’t really work all that well) or one of the many scripts, I have my own for it or the skin wrap method that also works very well.

Paul Neale
PEN Productions Inc.
penproductions.ca / paulneale.com
Master Classes for Max, Mudbox and Composite
DotNet Tutorials

MX Driver Car and Trailer Rig On Sale!

Well first off I would always use external meshes with the skin morph modifier as you can then use all the poly tools to edit the shapes that you need and are not stuck with the simple editing tools that are built into skin morph.

That makes sense. So you take a snapshot of the pose, edit the mesh and use as an external mesh,yes?
Mirror Morph Tool, that’s a new one on me, must be one of those new features that crept in without me noticing. I don’t see it anywhere.

It is in the new ribbon modeling tools, called something like Symmetry Tools I think. Again, it works, some of the time.

Paul Neale
PEN Productions Inc.
penproductions.ca / paulneale.com
Master Classes for Max, Mudbox and Composite
DotNet Tutorials

MX Driver Car and Trailer Rig On Sale!

OK, I’ve found it now, hiding away in a flyout. I got it working on a simple test object, I’ll have to see how it goes on my character mesh.
I did look on scriptspot.com yesterday to find a script for it and found this, but could not get it to work at all.
Thanks for the info.