Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

Now that our control rig is finished, it's time to envelope our character to the skeleton that we've built. Now, before we go in and add a skin modifier to our character to have those bones influence our mesh, what we first want to do is go ahead and reset the x form on our mesh to clean it up. This is primarily for mirroring our weights over. If we don't do this process, when we go in and mirror our weights, it's not going to work well at all. So, selecting our mesh, what we'll do is head over to the Utilities tab. And here it is, reset x form. Let's go and choose that and choose Reset Selected. Having over back or Modify panel, we can see it's been added on top of our stack, OK, great. So, now that are mesh is cleaned up, we can go ahead and select it once again and add our skin modifier. So, go into the Modifier list, I'll press the S key a few times, and there it is. OK, so now it's just a matter of going in and adding our bones to the bones list. Choose Add, and, again, to find all of the bones that we'll envelope to, we simply need to type in our find text box BN_. So we can see our naming convention playing a very important role here, saving us a lot of time. All right, so we'll just choose select, and now here's the fun part. We go in and start to move our controls and get an idea of how everything's deforming. OK, so you can see that the head is actually taking up a large range of influence. And if you wanted to see that, you could simply select the mesh, expand the skin modifier to get to the envelope, here's the head's envelope object represented by this gray line. We simply select that. And notice, because of that head bone being so large, it takes up a wide range, but this is actually not going to be too problematic to fix. We can start to move our back controls around, get an idea of how those are moving. And actually, we're getting great results from the chest. Let's check out the back. All right. We really don't have any work to do as far as fixing up the back's envelope. It looks great. So you can see how important it is to work with fins. There's the hips. The hips look really good too, wow. May not need to do too much work there. Let's go ahead and check out the legs. OK, you know what? We're actually going to be done in no time. Isn't that a great thing? Just have a few things to fix up here. Let's go ahead and check out our custom parameters. Wow, the foot's bending nice. Man, this is great. All right. Hey, maybe we'll be done in just one more lesson, huh? OK, the arms look pretty great. And again, we have to remove some influence coming from the head bone, but that won't take too long at all. And the shoulders look pretty good. All right. Great. So I'll go ahead and set that back to zero. Let's go ahead and look at the fingers. All right, not too bad. May need to just add some more influence coming from that finger root, But that's not bad at all. Let's go ahead and check out the other parts. The mid part, the finger. Whoops, zoomed in a little bit too much. All right, we're getting a little bit of collapsing, but I'll show you how to fix that. And again, it won't take too long. So now that we've double check our weights, we should be very pleased with our results, because we don't have much to edit it all. So I'll go ahead and stop the lesson here, and in the next lesson, we will start to modify the deformations we have checked out, and we'll start with the leg.