   Most easy method to rig/skin meshes
  Greetings!I was wondering, which program allows you to most easily set up a Human Skeleton for a mesh? I saw some ridiculus attemts with Character Studio in 3DS MAX. Okay, It is possible but with MAX BONES it is far easier to fit the bones into your mesh as with Character Studio - MY WORST IDEA is to SCALE the PARENT JOINTS in order to move current joint in the correct possition? I mean what the heck? Why couldn't I just pick the joint ant move it arround like a bone? I believe in year 2006 it should be possible. Is there any program out there, that handles skinning more natural, analogue and easy?Milkshape does not support weighting information and it has just bones, no system to copy/paste parallel bones like in 3dsmax.   
  Having weighted with a smooth bind/skin in both Maya and 3dsmax, I have to say that Max is far superior.  Being able to manually edit vertex weighting easily via numbers is almost hidden in Maya (Component Editor), Max it is really easy.  Also, Max allows you alot more model and whatnot editing before and after the fact than Maya.Biped and MaxBones are essentially the same thing as far as weighting goes... CS is just set up for a Biped (or quadraped) character.  There's generally no reason to do a realistic human character with maxbones instead of Biped.Once you get a better idea of animation, binding, and rigging, you'll see why you can't 'just pick the joint and move it around like a bone.'  One reason is because you CANT just pick bones up and move them around.  Bones have to be attached to one another, and moving destroys that.  Try grabbing your arm and moving it a foot to the right... does your shoulder extend, does it seperate?  No, your shoulder rotates, your elbow bends, your wrist twists and bends.  Alternative, you could have moved your arm if you shoulder could grow a foot in length... just like scaling.  See?What exactly are your problems?  With skeletal setup (rigging), or painting weights (binding/skinning)?   ;  My problem is, that it is very hard to SCALE instead of MOVE joints, I mean an upper arm could extend automaticaly then you move its joints? Huge problems when you try to adjust fingers, o my god!The thing is, even if you seem to fit the joints into the right place, the movement could still look un-natural, because for some joints it is better that they are placed higher than in the middle - let's take upper arm for example: the whole arm will bend more natural if the joint is slight higher than in the middle and weights can not solve that problem I could just rescale the biped to be a little higher, perhaps with non uniform scale.   ;Quote:Original post by Samurai JackMy problem is, that it is very hard to SCALE instead of MOVE joints, I mean an upper arm could extend automaticaly then you move its joints? Huge problems when you try to adjust fingers, o my god!The thing is, even if you seem to fit the joints into the right place, the movement could still look un-natural, because for some joints it is better that they are placed higher than in the middle - let's take upper arm for example: the whole arm will bend more natural if the joint is slight higher than in the middle and weights can not solve that problem I could just rescale the biped to be a little higher, perhaps with non uniform scale.i prefer to use bones within 3ds max, with a correctly setup skeleton structure and ik and fk (basically how it is before ik) and wiring the fingers you can animate very easily.basically the problems you're talking about can all be fixed by a correctly setup skeleton with bones.   