Floating cloak 3Dmax

[satanea juda]

I have a problem with this guys cloak it won't work as it should, he looks ok when mounted but the hood dosn't move with the head and as you can see when on foot it's floating, at the moment its connected to the cloak bone, i've tried weighting it to the head and body but then it goes though him when he moves, any idea's. i'm close to getting rid of the cloak for an easy life, but he looks better with it.

https://img101.imageshack.us/img101/7504/general8gu.jpg (https://imageshack.us)

[Ciaran]

On the danger of appearing a smarta**, because I actually can´t model myself (it´s like building a house, in theory I know how to go about it, but you wouldn´t want to step even close to it if I actually had to do it), maybe you could try to seperate hood and cloak, weighing the cloak part to the cloak bone and the hood to the head. I suppose that´s how it´s done with the druids and Arcani, you might look at their model for inspiration.

[caius britannicus]

Heres your problem, by attaching it to a single cloak bone only its only going to move with that one bone. Thats why its been lifted slighty and why the hood doesn't move with the head. You need to add a skin modifier to the cloak and weight each vertex to one of 5 different bones in this case (the head, torso, cloak_top, cloak_mid, cloak_bottom). You should read up on the skin modifier tutorials here on the org. This way you tell the vertices on the head to move with the head, the ones on the torso to move with the torso etc.

[satanea juda]

Thats what i thought but when i did that i didn't connect to the head and cloak, only the cloak attempt 1, and head torso attempt 2.

Thanks.

[Bwian]

Also, the hierarchy in Max for cloaked figures is a little...er..odd!

Load up the roman arcanii as an example, and look at the hierarchy. The cloak seems to exist as a seperate object in the same model, linked to the same bones. Just copy the structure used for your own model and ensure that the hood and shoulders of the cloak are linked to the head and torso, and that the rest of the cloak is linked to the cloak bones. ll should be fine then. When I made a cloaked unit for the Undead, I did it this way and copied the structure used for the arcanii. Worked fine.

[satanea juda]

I thought there was something odd, when i looked at the schematic for the druid (cloak source) it wasn't connected to anything, but the problem was after i reshaped it as a poly it wouldn't export, i got the same msg's linked to bone if static, each vertex weighted ect... max is like an old kung fu master, just when you think you got it, you get a slap over the head.

[caius britannicus]

when an object is not connected to a bone it is using the skin modifier. Its nothing odd at all. Read up on the skin modifier tutorinal and you'll understand things alot better.

[satanea juda]

He's sorted thanks, but now i'm having problems with this guy, when i import him in game his tunic is twisted, so i added a uv map but it dosn't work, is there some way of sorting this, i think it's because i merged new arms and welded them to the body, if that helps. oh and the sections don't overlap in the unwrap uv.

https://img294.imageshack.us/img294/9664/buddhist011pt.jpg (https://imageshack.us)

He should look like this.

https://img154.imageshack.us/img154/500/buddhist025gw.jpg (https://imageshack.us)

[hoccalugee]

yeah, it does that when you merge them to the body. each separately applied part of the uvw map needs to be detached as an element. i had to learn that one the hard way!

[satanea juda]

And now it seems so did i, thanks that worked a treat.