Skin Mini Tutorial

Situation: You have two skinned objects in 3ds Max, and you need them to be one skinned object. Again, this skin tutorial is written in a general way to easily reproduce when you bump into this situation.

1. Go into Figure Mode or Skin Pose or Bind Pose, and set the slider to Frame 0.
2. Select both objects.
3. Go to Edit | Clone
4. Pick Copy and click OK.
5. Select the new copies and convert to edit poly to collapse the modifier stack.
6. Attach one object to the other.
7. Select your object and add a Skin Wrap modifier.
8. Click the Add button in the modify panel and add both of the original objects by clicking on them. (They should still be skinned.)
9. Change Deformation Engine to Face Deformation.
10. Check Weight All Points
11. Click on Convert to Skin.

Optionally, you can skip clicking Convert to Skin and when you update the skinning the two original objects the skin wrap will update as well. If you are exporting to a game engine, you do need to convert to skin though.

Reactor Physics Hinge Tutorial

Reactor is the Physics system used in 3ds Max 2011 and earlier. I created this tutorial for a post on Polycount.com, but many people still use older versions of 3ds Max. So I thought I should post it here as well. Please comment and let me know if it works for you. The tutorial is written in a general way so that you can reproduce the steps on your own objects.

Click here to download the completed Max File

Reactor Hinge Tutorial Max File

Creating the Hinge:

1. Parent object b (the Small Box) to object a (the Larger Box).
2. Change the pivot on object b so that rotating the Z axis gives the effect you want.
3. Hold ALT + Shift and Right click for the reactor menu.
4. Select Hinge Constraint and click on the ground near your objects.
5. Select the Hinge object and in the modify panel set object B as the Child.
6. Check the Parent option and set object A as the parent.
7. Click on Child Space and Child Body.
8. Don't worry about the Min and Max Angles, the collisions will take care of that.

Creating the Hinge Solver:

1. Hold ALT + Shift and Right click for the reactor menu.
2. Click on Constraint Solver and click on the ground near the objects to create one.
3. Select the Solver and in the modify panel click on Pick and select the Hinge.
4. Select object a and b
5. Hold ALT + Shift and Right click for the reactor menu.
6. Click on Rigid Body Collection, the selected objects will be added automatically.
7. Select the Solver and in the modify panel set the RB Collection as the Rigid Body Collection object.

Create the Rigid Body Collection:

1. Open the Reactor right click menu and click on Open Property Editor
2. Select object A, and in the Property Editor check Unyielding and set Shell to 0.
3. (This means it's a hand keyed object that influences physics)
4. Select object B and give it mass.
5. (Doesn't matter how much, unless it hits other objects.)
6. Also and set Shell to 0.

Preview and Bake:

1. Go to the utility panel and open the Reactor utility.
2. Click on Preview animation.
3. You can edit the Timing setting and preview again.
4. If everything is cool you can click on Create Animation to bake.