Weight Painting/Rigging in Max

[hoodoo_man]

Hi everybody,

 

I think this is the appropriate place to ask this. If I'm wrong, could one of the mods kindly move and/or delete this (since they probably would anyway ).

 

Anyway, I did something stupid--not sure quite what yet--Oblivion-style and lost all the weights on my mesh. To compound this, I didn't notice for a while. I now have to backtrack quite a ways, because rigging and/or weight painting and/or whatever anyone wants to call it, is a rather esoteric skill and I try to stay away from it as much as possible .

 

It occurred to me that if I just finally bit the bullet and learned to more or less re-weight things myself, I wouldn't have these problems. I could make my mesh look like whatever I want and just re-rig it at the end. Is that possible? If so, could someone possibly--if there were enough cookies (or fishy sticks) or whatever involved--write a small tutorial on rigging/weight painting your model that was comprehensible to someone with little to no experience and finally, how to do it in 3DS Max since I know this is mostly a Blender crowd, and I've seen people suggest really arcane work-arounds to NOT have to re-weight in Blender (and I thought Blender had a re-weight button basically)?

 

I understand the theory behind it just fine. Every vertex needs to be attached/influenced by one or more bones in order for it to animate correctly--or at all . The various bone weights in any given vertex need to add to one, because they are essentiallly percentiges showing how much a given bone affects that vertex. Am I doing OK so far? It's when you have something complex like an outfit, armor, a body, you know , and you have a mesh, you have a skeleton, and you want to attach your mesh to said skeleton, how do you go about that? Obviously you can't calculate each of like 4000 vertex weights seperately--or you really, really, don't want to and wouldn't know how to divide them up anyway (and this is coming from someone who once-upon-a-time, long ago, actually edited an image pixel by pixel in MS Paint on a 486 machine, for lack of better options.)

 

So let the fear and trembling begin--or please, please, please could someone who knows what they're doing finally reveal either that A) there is a "re-weight" button in Max, and I just can't find it. That's entirely possible. The interface for Max is designed so back-a$$wardsly that it could easily be in some icon somewhere, or B) the arcane secrets of rigging meshes for those of us who are clueless about it and will do almost anything to avoid messing with vertex weights if they can help it.

 

I realize it's probably not that simple--but it can't be as complex as I think it is, or no one would do it. Ever. And then where would we be? So if there are any 3DSMax gurus about, could you possibly take some time to at least explain why what I'm asking is totally infeasable and I need to go back to square one, and continue to fear rigging ?

 

Thanks in advance if anyone is willing to take this on,

 

Hoodoo Man