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Using Bones Pro   
by GWOT    

Setting Up a Skeleton in Bones Pro

If you thought doing linked xforms was fun then you will love BonesPRo for Max. It makes skeletal animation nearly effortless. The best part is that we can take our skeleton from the first tutorial and plop it right into bonespro. All we need for this tutorial is the original skeleton we made (with no dummies attatched and no mesh verts linked to it) and a mesh to attach to it.

The Space Warp

First load up your skeleton and your mesh and make sure that the skeleton has been properly fitted within the mesh. Go to the Create SpaceWarp tab and use the scroll bar to select Digimation Warps and click on the Bones Pro button. Pick a viewport and click somewhere nearby your mesh like above and to the right or something. You will see the object appear for the Bones Pro space warp and the Bones Pro Space Warp rollout will appear on the right side of the screen. Click on the Assign button in the Bones section of the rollout and select every bone in your skeleton from the popup selection list. At this point you want to bind your mesh to the space warp as well. Select the mesh, click on the Bind To Space Warp button in the top toolbar and click/drag from the mesh to the spacewarp and release. Next select your space warp and go to the modify panel to get back into the bonespro rollout. From the Bound Node section click on the "None" button and select your mesh from the list. The mesh name should show up in the button now, indicating it is the current bound node for this space warp. This basically sets up your mesh with the spacewarp and skeleton. It is now ready to animate - sort of. Try going into animation mode in max, enable IK and move your skeleton around abit. You will see it deforming the mesh but it may not seem very elegant at this point. Most likely you will want to edit the influence of particular bones over the mesh. Note: you can only deform your mesh in bones pro when animation is turned on.

The Influence Editor

The Influence Editor is the key to controlling how your skeleton affects your mesh when you animate it. Each bone in Bones Pro affects all verts to some degree when you first apply the space warp. By regulating the amount of influence each bone exerts you can localize this result to gain more accurate control of your mesh. If you move the mouse over a bone you will see its strength and falloff settings appear on the status bar at the bottom of the IE window. Also if you enable the Draw Mesh tool and then click on the Visualize Bone Influence tool you can see the effects of a bone's Strength and Falloff settings on the mesh itself by selecting a bone. The blue areas of the mesh represent the parts that are not influenced by the selected bone. The red areas indicate that the bone has absolute control over the mesh at that point (usually the area surrounding the middle of the bone. The green areas encompass the falloff influence of the bone, where its influence over the mesh decreases (usually the ends of the bone).

View Port Controls


These tools function exactly the same as the ones for max, enabling you to control your view within the Influence editor.

Bone Selection Controls


These tools are for selection of bones within the editor.

Influence Controls


These tools allow you to adjust the Strength and Falloff settings of a bone when you select it as well as visualize their effects on the mesh.

Vertex Selection Controls


These allow you to select/deselect verts by area (drawing a window) or by their current relationship to selected bones.

Include/Exclude Controls


These tools work in conjunction with the vertex and bone selection tools by allowing you to include or exclude verts in a bone's influence range. You must have a bone and some verts selected in the viewport in order to use these functions.

Visualization Controls


These three tools enable you to toggle the display of bones, mesh, and verts in the editor window.

I wont go into detailed explanations of what each tool does in the Influence editor because it is so very simple to figure out. What you want to do in the editor is make sure that each bone in your skeleton is only affecting the areas of the mesh that surround it, and fine tune this control. So if you are moving the left foot of the skeleton in an animation and noticing that verts from the right foot are moving too, then you obviously have to exclude these verts from the left foot's influence. If you find the shin bone is affecting verts in the thigh too much then try reducing its falloff settings. Using bones pro is an exercise in trial and error, but don't worry, its pretty damn hard to Farg things up with this plugin. Have fun with it.