Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

In this lesson, we'll learn how to save and load envelope weights in Max. Let's say if we ever needed to go in and fix the orientation of one of our bones. Now, the thumb is a perfect example. We can see that the orientation of our thumb chain differs from the orientation of our thumb geometry. We can see that clearly by looking at our nub. And of course, if we were to go in and select the bone and rotate that, it would show up in the envelope. So here's where saving weights in Max plays an important role. It's actually a really seamless process, and I'll show you how to set this up to make sure that everything gets loaded back just fine. So, to save out your weights, what you want to do is go ahead and select your mesh. And under your Skin parameters, you'd want to expand Advanced parameters. So it should be all the way at the bottom. From there, you simply choose Save. And now it should bring you to your seams folder, but I've actually gone ahead and navigated to the export folder. And from there, we can go ahead and come up with a name for it. So I always call it AnimationCharacterEnvelopes. And choose Save. Once that's done, we can now go in and remove our skin modifier. So with it selected, I'll go ahead and just trash it. From there, we'd want to go in and modify the orientation of our bone. So I'll go ahead and select that mid bone, since that's the one that needs to be edited. With that selected, we can go back to shaded mode and start to rotate this with gimbal in the x-axis to fix that orientation. OK, so the bending is going to be much better now. All right, so once that's done, we can now go ahead and do the same thing on the right side. I'll go in and select the bone. I'm using angle snap to rotate this. I'll zoom in. And go ahead and just rotate this, and we could use the nub as reference to make sure that we're going to be bending in the right axis. Once our bones have been rotated, the next step is going to be to go ahead and refreeze this. So that does mean we'll need to go back and relink or rewire our finger bending back to that custom parameter we've made. But that's no problem at all. Let's ahead and Alt, right click, Freeze Parameters and notice the orientation is now fixed on that bone. We can go ahead and do the same on the left side. Then select it again, just Alt, right click, Freeze Transforms. OK, so now it's just a matter of relinking, and then we can go ahead and bring back that skin modifier and reapply our weights. So what I'll actually go ahead and do is head over to the layer manager, we can select our character, turn on x-ray, and then go ahead and freeze it. All right, going back to our control, right click, Wire Parameters, Modified Object, Attribute Holder, Attributes, Mid Z, and we plug that right back in. It's going to be these zero Euler z, which is the right arrow here. That's going to be the bottom arrow. And then we simply type in [INAUDIBLE]. Just connect, and there we have it. So now our bone is working just fine. All right, let's take care of the right side and we will reapply our weights. So the thumb can be kind of tricky to get just right. But with these tools that Max provides us, man, it's saves us so much time to correct certain things. All right, so again, we'll just go ahead and use wire parameters to get this going. Mid z goes into our mid bones. Rotation zero Euler z. Go ahead and type in our function, and choose connect. All right, there we go. All right, so now that we've corrected the orientation, it's time to bring those weights back. Heading back to the Layer Manager, we can go ahead and unfreeze our character. We can go ahead and turn off x-ray. That's a matter of going to our modifier list, finding the skin modifier, again we're going to need to scroll all the way up, get to our bones list, and reapply our bones. So that's BN_ to select. OK, great. So from here, now we can load back our weight. So let's see in and learn how to do this process. Go ahead and choose Load now. Go ahead and choose the envelopes that we saved out, choose Open. Now, what we get here is this matching dialogue. The current envelopes want to match with the incoming envelopes. That's how we're going to make this a seamless process. What you also want to be very mindful of is that you don't add any extra envelopes. Otherwise, this is not going to work too well. So you just want to make sure, again, that you're using the same envelope objects. If you need to add in any extras, go ahead and do that afterwards. But by doing so, we can just use match by name to make sure all of these will be linked one to another. So once we've checked that, now we can go ahead and choose OK. And notice this. If we were to go ahead and select our head control and start to rotate that around, notice the envelopes are brought back the same way. Here we can go ahead and select our leg control, start to move that. Not the global control, but the leg. There we go. Just fine. And then our chest control. You can start to rotate that around. Excellent. So again, we've learned how to save and load weights, and we learned how efficient that tool really is, how much time it can save us in production. So I'm going to go ahead and stop the lesson here, and in the next lesson, we will bring our attention back to editing the deformations of the fingers.