My knowledge of max is limited, been using it mostly for importing and exporting stuff. So far i've been fine with working with simpler skeletons for weapons. But now i'm getting into replacing characters and creatures with new meshes.

Does any one have some advice to help work with the more complicated skeletons and meshes to help speed up the work flow? I've always found this part of the process to be the most tidious and time consuming part to get things working right.

thanks.

You're talking about skinning?.

Unfortunately there is no real quick fix for skinning. There are quick setups using the envelopes to get you started but the tweaking to get verts weighted just right is the tedious work.

Of course the Skin modifier offer some help by being able to mirror both envelopes and vertex weights. You can also use the weight painter to quicken the process.

In general for the low poly game models the work is not that much, since you don't have that many verts to weight. But it is one of the more time consuming things to do when making a character for the game.

Thanks, never thought of mirror mode.

I ended up upgrading to max 8 after trying out the skin wrap option, which worked like a charm for adding a new model on a premade skeleton.

I never tried to export Skin Wrap.. can you export that back to MD5?. From how I understand the exporter work you might not be able to.

This what I think it was made for. it was apart of max7, they added a few options in 8 for skinning.

The skin wrap modifier was ment for copying the attributes, like XSI's gator from the low poly model to a high.

Click the skin wrap modifier then add in the mesh you want to copy from and then go to convert to skin and it makes the skin modifier for you. Sometimes it does miss stuff if things are a little too different, usually nothing that you can't fix with a little painting. Once the skin modifier is added, you can delete the skin wrap.