Chapter 41: Skinning Characters


In the taxidermy world, skinning an animal usually involves removing its skin, but in the Max world, skinning a character involves adding a skin mesh to a group of controlling bones. Skinning a character also involves defining how the skin deforms as the bones are moved.

A character skin created in Max can be any type of object and is attached to a biped or a bones skeleton using the Skin modifier. The Skin modifier isn't alone. Max includes other modifiers like the Skin Wrap and Skin Morph modifiers that make your skin portable. This chapter covers explains how the various Skin modifiers are attached to a skeleton and used to aid in animating your character.

Understanding Your Character

What are the main aspects of your character? Is it strong and upright, or does it hunch over and move with slow, twisted jerks? Before you begin modeling a character, you need to understand the character. It is helpful to sketch the character before you begin. This step gives you a design that you can return to as needed.

Tip 

The sketched design also can be loaded and planar mapped to a plane object to provide a guide to modeling.

You have an infinite number of reference characters available to you (just walk down a city street if you can't think of anything new). If you don't know where to start, then try starting with a human figure. The nice thing about modeling a human is that an example is close by (try looking in the mirror).

We all know the basic structure of humans: two arms, two legs, one head, and no tail. If your character is human, then starting with a human character and changing elements as needed is the easiest way to go. As you begin to model human figures, being familiar with anatomy is helpful. Understanding the structure of muscles and skeletal systems helps explain the funny bumps you see in your elbow and why muscles bulge in certain ways.

Tip 

If you don't have the model physique, then a copy of Gray's Anatomy can help. With its detailed pictures of the underlying muscular and skeletal systems, you'll have all the details you need without having to pull your own skin back.

The curse and blessing of symmetry

The other benefit of the human body is that it is symmetrical. You can use this to your benefit as you build your characters, but be aware that unless you're creating a band of killer robots, it is often the imperfections in the characters that give them, well, character. Positioning an eye a little off normal might give your character that menacing look you need.

Dealing with details

When you start to model a human figure, you quickly realize that the body includes lots of detail, but before you start naming an object "toenail lint on left foot," look for details you won't need. For example, modeling toes is pointless if your character will be wearing shoes and won't be taking them off. (In fact, I think shoes were invented so that animators wouldn't have to model toes.)

At the same time, details in the right places add to your character. Look for the right details to help give your character life-a pirate with an earring, a clown with a big red nose, a tiger with claws, a robot with rivets, and so on.

Figure 41.1 shows two good examples. The ninja warrior on the left doesn't need the details of a mouth or teeth because they are hidden behind his mask. In fact, if you were to remove his mask, the model would leave a large gaping hole. The Greek woman statue model on the right includes many necessary details including fingernails, toes, a bellybutton, and, uh, well, uh, other details.

Note 

You can actually find these two character models on the DVD at the back of the book, compliments of Viewpoint Datalabs.

image from book
Figure 41.1: These two characters have details modeled where needed.




3ds Max 9 Bible
3ds Max 9 Bible
ISBN: 0470100893
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 383

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