UE3 - UT3 Modifiers - Skin Wrap, Skin - Bone Envelopes

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Drew_Beyond

New Member
Apr 7, 2010
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Hello,

I have actually wasted probably a day and a half reading through forum threads trying to get information on the modifiers used with the provided skeleton meshes, with little luck pertaining to my particular questions.

The first question I have is - precisely what is the Skin Wrap modifier doing applied to most mesh pieces in the UT3_Male.max file?

It doesn't appear to be doing anything, and I wondered if I actually needed it to be applied to my own mesh on the same parts.

I have had a mesh finished for a few days now, set up in the same pose as the one in that file. I wanted to crack on with weighting all the bones to my mesh, but wanted to know a little on what these modifiers are doing first.

The Skin modifier is used, and I planned on closely following how it is weighted.

The second question I have is - Why are not all bones in the Skin modifiers weighted to the vertices?

They appear to be adding one or two bones to all Skin modifiers, which I wouldn't naturally think should be added to them. For example the torso has Arm, Arm Roll and Neck bones applied, which seem to have no effect on any vertex in the torso when viewing the envelopes.

People seem to come up against many problems, so I thought I should perhaps just copy the structure they have used, and actually not delete the shoulderpad bones despite not needing them - as apparently bone deletion sometimes causes problems also, despite being told in the documentation we can.

Is this a good rule of thumb to follow, just adding the bones as shown?

Thanks for any advice,
Andrew.
 

kellett66

New Member
Apr 25, 2010
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"The first question I have is - precisely what is the Skin Wrap modifier doing applied to most mesh pieces in the UT3_Male.max file?"

the Skin Wrap modifier allows one mesh to deform another so for instance the legs could deform the bottom of a characters long coat that covers parts of the legs this may be why for example some parts of the mesh is not wighted beacuse it is being deformed by another. that kinda anwsers question two aswell, and no you do not need the Skin Wrap applyed if you do not plan to have one mesh deform another.

hope this helps
 

Drew_Beyond

New Member
Apr 7, 2010
2
0
0
Really I just wondered if there was some reason it was needed for anything in engine. I'm fairly noob and haven't modelled for any engines before so don't really understand the requirements, I'm just following documentation and hoping it all works :crazydance:

I figured I would move on without the Skin Wrap anyway since I haven't used it before and it doesn't seem to benefit me. I'm sure I might get a chance to play with it more in future to understand how it works better, but for now I'm sticking with the basic Skin modifier.

Anyway thanks for the help kellett.

Andrew.