Skinning Max

  Phew, I got Max fully modeled and rigged. All there's left is skinning Max and animating him. Skinning sounds like a simple process to do because practically what your doing is adding the bones to the model and then adjusting weights on the bones to prevent any stretching occurring on the textures.

  I like to think of this process as guess and check, not literally but you get the picture. To get into detail what I mean is, adjusting the weights of the model and then checking based on that adjustment.. How the textures look on the model. Is there any stretching still because the bones were adding? To actually begin skinning, in the modifiers tab I chose Skin. With Skin being selected in the stack I hit Add right next to bones. Having hit Add I chose Max's Pelvis and hit Control C. Doing that allows to select all bones child to Pelvis. Having done that I hit select which adds all those bones to the Skin modifier or in other words.. Adds the skeleton to the model. Now if we wanted to we could go straight to animating and the actual model would move. The problem is, now that the skeleton has been added to Max there is possible stretching that may occur. The weights of each bone can affect not only the textures but the actual model itself. With the picture above you can see what I mean. Having selected one of the bones in the body brings out a capsule as well as a few color. I like to think of the color as temperature. So the cooler the color is, the less the body will be influenced by the bone and the hotter the color the more influence is occuring. As you can see above, having select the middle bone you can see its influencing part of the arm. Wait what? Why would that bone influence an arm? So what this means is if we were to move or rotate this bone, the arms would be influenced as well. I'll just say it, we don't want this. If anything there shouldn't be any influence what so ever between these two. This is where editing envelopes comes along. The capsules are the envelopes which produce different temperature representing the influence level the bone gives out. The goal I had was to have minimal influence in locations that would make sense to not have influence in.

  As you can see with the picture above, by clicking the quads envelope, the influence levels are only or mainly at the quads and minimal from top to knee. So how did I minimize the influence levels you may ask. Actually I just learn how to do this in a more simple way. Having selected an envelope I hit vertices and begun selecting all the vertices I wanted either more or less influence on. After selecting the vertices I went to weight properties. In Weight properties there's a spot called Abs Effect. In Abs Effect you can adjust the weight's influence level of a bone through numerical values. 1.0 being the hottest to 0.0 being no influence at all. So what i did for each envelope was select vertices I wanted no influence at and set the Abs Effect to 0.0.

  After doing this to all envelopes and becoming satisfied, I was able to begin animating the model. I'm not going to lie, after finishing with skinning Max I got more excited because I was dying to integrate him in the game already. Well let's jump to animating now!