Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

In this lesson we'll learn how to mirror weight in Max. OK, so let's learn the process for mirroring weights. Selecting our mesh. We're going to edit envelope. We want to move down to our mirror parameters. From there we choose mirror mode, and notice we get this plane right at the center of our character. The plane is determined by this mirror plane parameter. Notice we can change this if we want. Well, we probably don't want to. These red areas represent areas that Max can't read too well. So we can see definitely that the first setting, x, is what we want to choose. All right, now being that we worked on the left side, and we want to mirror to the right, basically we want to choose the option that's going to allow us to mirror these green vertices over to the blue over vertices. So here are the settings to do that. And here's the option we want to choose. Paste green to blue. So when we choose that, notice everything is mirrored over. We can come out of mirror mode, come out of our edited envelope, and go ahead and start to move our controls around and see what this gives us. I'll go to the arm control and start to move that. All right. So it's looking pretty good. Now areas like these where the arm is bending, all you need to do is go in and modify the capture or the capsule, because that wasn't mirrored, but our weights were. So let me show you what I'm talking about. If we were to go in and start to bring this capsule back, notice we get that volume back in the elbow. So I'll just tweak this out a little bit more. Great So again, even after we mirror, there's going to be some refinement we still need to do, but they won't take long at all. They shouldn't. That looks good. Let's go ahead and check out the fingers. Great. They mirrored over perfectly. All right. That's how much time this saves. Imagine if we had to go back in and re-weight the fingers. There's the thumb. Excellent. OK, great. So that looks good. We can check out the legs. Great. Look at that. Again, you can see how much time this tool really saves. There might be a little bit of pulling still, but we know exactly how to fix that. Just like select those vertices and make sure that there's no weight coming from that left side. You can check out the upper body. Start to rotate the hip. That looks good. Start to rotate the back. Great. We'll get to the chest control and start to rotate that around. Excellent. All right, and the head should be fine. It's like, it sure is. OK, well, we've learned how to mirror weights, and we also saw that though it's not going to be a perfect mirror, the corrections that we'll need to make won't take any time. So with that done, we can go ahead and say our character rig is complete. We've learned a lot. I definitely recommend going back and ironing out a few areas that may be unclear to you. So we can use these tools that we discussed advantageously. So you can use them even more creatively then we used in this course to create the greatest rig you can. And again, we have a course that follows this that covers a more in depth look at building control rigs. How to maintain volume in the upper arm and in the wrist, and also how to create a pretty advanced spine rig that keeps the twist distribution, things like that. But before we actually close this off, I'm going to go ahead and show you one more thing in the following lesson, and that's how to work with the morpher modifier for adding things like facial animation.