Hi guys im working on a character at the moment, i want him to have robotic movement, he has hard joints at his elbows and knees but springs in his torso and shoulders / thighs. I’m using 3ds max and keep getting distortion using bones and the skin modifier which i don’t want at all. However all the tutorials i have seen for robot style animation involves applying a bone to a separated body part, now my character is all just one mesh as to improve performance, i can see the benefit if you are going pre rendered but i don’t understand how i can achieve that for a game asset.
How is it distorting? You mean as if it were a fleshy character?
For a robot character you should probably have each hard surface fully weighted to a single bone (e.g. you wouldn’t want the lower leg being influenced by the upper leg bone). The springs and stretchy parts can be influenced by multiple bones.
I did a character recently that had a mix of hard and soft surfaces. It was easier to rig the different parts of the character as separate objects and combine them later (I use Blender; I assume Max allows you to do this).
I have tried the adding a weight of 1.00 to all verticies to be effected by the bone but if i then say rotate the bone or anything it will squish and streach still, is their an option i need to select to either allow or disable the fleshiness on a particular bone?