Character Rigging In 3ds Max.
Breaking The Mesh :
So with only our bone mesh visible in the scene, we'll start to detach parts that we will use as bones. It is HIGHLY recommended that you rename each detached piece. You can do this during the detach process though, which is nice . In either Editable Mesh or Poly , using the sub-object Polygon mode, select areas of your mesh that you wish to detach. How well these detached pieces will function as bones depend entirely on how the mesh was modelled.
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The best I can do from here is show you how I would break my mesh up. When detaching yours, just be sure to think logically, we are creating bones for our skin here, so detach within reason. Think about where the joints are, and how you can split the mesh to eventually allow movement of those joints. A combined knowledge of basic anatomy, hierarchical linking and pivot points will help you ten-fold here. Also now would be a good time to become BEST friends with the Save function. Ctrl + S should be a natural movement to you by the end of this tutorial, get used to it.
Just to give you a better idea of what's going on here, here's an image of my progression. Take note of how I'm naming each separate piece, organisation is key when dealing with mass amounts of small objects.
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This process can usually take some time, and often leaves you deselecting , and reselecting faces whilst you ponder it over in your head. But when all is said and done, you will have a completely detached mesh. Before we jump right onto sorting out the pivot points of each individual object, when you detach the very last piece of your mesh, your “Bone Mesh” will still be in the scene, it just won't have any faces ( as we've detached them all ). You can either leave the very last piece as it is, and just rename it, Or detach it, and then simply delete your 'Bone Mesh'.
If you are going to be animating the face then you can still use this broken mesh method. While my character wasn't modelled for much facial animation, I can still put in some bones that will raise/lower his eye lids and 'maybe' make him smile/frown. My character doesn't have a mouth as such, but just by the simple act of nudging his jaw line up and down we can imitate speech quite well. ( obviously not as well as having the top lip separate from the bottom lip though )
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In the above example, don't let the colour coordination fool you, they are all separate objects.
In the below example, I have selected all of my finger/thumb bones and opened the hierarchy window to demonstrate how many I have, and how I have named them. You'll notice my thumb has 3 bones, like all my fingers. And you should also have noticed, that in reality, our thumbs have one less joint than our fingers, the reason for adding in the third is for the 'roll' that our thumb is able to do.
After we are done detaching all of our bones, we need to correctly align the pivot points of each individual object, because at the moment, our pivots for all of those objects are still at the root of Max' world space, 0,0,0. ( Or wherever your initial pivot point for the character was ) Before we hop onto that though, here's a locally scaled version of my characters bones, this should help you understand how I broke up my mesh.
One thing worth mentioning would be these bones here:
That's my characters Left and Right Clavicle bones, and it is very important that you include the clavicle if you're animating a human type character. The main purpose of these bones is to lift up when the shoulder goes past a certain degree, so instead of the mesh in that area collapsing in on itself and looking all ugly, it will rise as if it were actually part of the shoulder. But when the shoulder is lowered down, the clavicle will not follow. (I cover how to go about this later on)
So that's that... next up, Pivot Points!
