subject: Lesson 100 - Character Arms and Legs - Part [print this page] Lesson 100 - Character Arms and Legs - Part
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Speaking of character animation, we've been setting up a simple character mesh in 3D Studio MAX over the last few lessons. If you haven't read the previous columns in this series, you may want to catch up before turning to this one.
We've finished the tedious process of weighting the vertices from the hips to the head, and are now ready for the arms and legs. Let's start with the legs. In my experience, you have to do an entire leg as a unit thigh, calf and foot. It also pays to work on both right and left legs together to make sure that adjustments made on one side are properly copied on the other.
First, we do the rough work. We adjust the envelope around a thigh to fit as snugly as possible, and then copy the adjusted envelope to the other thigh. You can see the value of modeling with the legs slightly spread. If the legs were close together, as in a normal standing posture, you'd end up with overlapping envelopes, and therefore more vertices to weight by hand.
Next, we fit the envelope around the calf, and copy this envelope to the other calf.
It's not worth fooling with the envelope for the foot. We can safely start by just selecting all the vertices that should be controlled by the foot bone and set them to 100 percent weighting (as indicated by the red color).3D Models It's very easy to unintentionally select vertices on the other foot or elsewhere on the mesh, so you've got to be careful.
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