Topic awaiting preservation: Gmax Envelopes

When useing a skin animation modifier in gmax it creates an envelope around the bone. My problem is that the envelope always gets vertexes that I don't want it to. If I make the envelope smaller it starts missing some of the vertexes. Painting the wieghts on helps but not enough.

Does anybody have a suggestion for working with envelopes or a way to make an envelope not include a object that does not have that boneadded to it?

(insert funny joke here)

Well...remembering that I only work with 3D studio max, so it may be a little different, but I know that there is an potion to paint an exclude or include vertex thing-ma-bob, try that, it should be in hte option and paremeters for the envelop thingy.

Skaarjj, it's the exact same system and method, at least it should be. Your thing-ma-bob sounds interesting.

3DS Max comes with some excellant tutorials on skinnning bones. I haven't gotten too in-depth with them, but this sounds like a good opportunity to do some fiddling.

Until someone pops in with more info, all I can really say is to build your model with skinning in mind. Fore-thought can save a lot of headaches down the road.

Ready for some skin vert editing? All meshed, boned and skinned? Good. Here we go for a tid-bit.

Bone selected and viewport is Smooth + Highlights. Click Edit Envelope (duh). Scroll down a bit to Filters and make sure only Vertices is checked. Open up Display and check Colored Vertice Weights and Show All Verts (IMHO, easier). Then click a vert you want to exclude and it should become highlighed. Click Exclude Verts and it turns blue, meaning it's not in the envelop anymore.

Ahh... something like that. My Max is having fits right now, but that looks right to me.

That does it. Thanks for the help.
Thought that there had to be blindingly easy way to do that.

(insert funny joke here)

No, thank you. If you hadn't asked, I probably would never have bothered until it was crunch time. One of my biggest ways of learning is figuring out other peoples' problems. Anyways, glad it worked for ya.

Skaarjj, that painting weights thing is pretty damn spiffy. My Bag O' Tricks got that much bigger.

Why thank YOU WJ. I came accross that completley by accident one day when trying to bone a character (god that doesn't sound good), and the envelopes were pissing me off becuase it had multiple bones down the spine and the envelopes would overlap, so I investigated into a diffrenet weay to do it. A couple of months later I discovered that I should have used forward kinematics for the spine and only used inverse kinematics for the arms, legs and tail.