Unruly bone/rigging behavior in Max

#1 Well i got an idea whats going on, so basically try one of the two things i am going to suggest.

you need to combine the primitives to one mesh, this doesnt mean they all have to be welded, just be one object. and then bind it to the bones.

Or

bind each primitive to the bones. seperately.

hope this helps.

#2 Umm also you are going to want to hand do parts of the weights so that it acts correctly.

#3 If its just a plain robor that doesn't flex you can just link the rigid shapes to the bones, and they inherit the bones transforms.

I havent tried it in Torque though, but it will work in max and has worked in other game engines for things like armour and robots.

#4 Even if you don't want to make the thing one mesh select all the parts and apply a skin modifier to them then right click in the modifier panel and select "Make Unique" then you can weight in each piece.

Probably the best thing to start out doing is read the tutorial provided with max on Character animation/ skinning the mesh. It will at least fill in the blanks for you.

Matt

#5 After you apply the skin modifier, you sitll need to set your weights. I usually work on the vertice level and manually set their weights with the type-in box rather than mess with envelopes just so I can be sure that each vertex is being weighted.

#6 With Max 8 there have been numerous improvements with the Skin modifier that I think people have missed out.

First and foremost is that it is pretty accurate now with its envelope sizes when you add a bone to the skin modifier (thus requireing less tweaking).

Second and most importantly is that there is a nifty little tool called "Skin Weight" (it looks like a little wrench near the parameters roll-out). Now whats so useful about Skin weight is that when you are using a vertex selection type in the skin modifier, you can select per vertex, or an edge ring/loop of verticies and see how each bone is influencing these verticies and adjust the values. This allows for some very fast tweaking, cleaning and modification to get your weights rock solid and in the end setup good weights for a Torque character (like the Orc or Elf) in well under a half hour.

Logan

PS: I guess I should probably write up the "Max 8 for Torque artists doc" huh?

Logan

#7 I completed the a few tutorials covering weighting the vertices over the weekend. Now it's all stuck to the bones like it should be. Thanks everyone for helping me rule out any problems with the Skeleton Generator and getting me on the right track!