Previewing Motion

After you attach the skin to the skeleton, Physique deforms the skin when the skeleton is animated. From this point on, you can preview animation to see how the Physique skin deforms and whether you can use it in a finished animation or need to correct and refine it further.

You'll probably need to adjust some of the default envelope settings to ensure all vertices are being properly handled. By moving the skinned character in the viewports you can see problems with vertex assignments.

A stray vertex on the right elbow not encompassed by an envelope.

See the Envelope Sub-Object topic for procedures and interface.

TipPhysique skins are usually too large for 3ds Max to play them back in real time at 30 frames per second. However, character studio allows fluid motions of many skinned meshes. When you attempt to play back at 30 fps, 3ds Max might drop frames during playback, which makes it hard to see how Physique has animated the skin. If you use the Time Configuration dialog to turn off real-time playback, The animation will play back more slowly than usual, but it plays every frame.

TipYou can also specify which elements of the characters not to display in the viewports, and thereby speed up redraw. See Physique Level of Detail Rollout.

For a skin attached to a complicated skeleton such as a biped, you will almost always need to correct some vertex assignments before the skin animates correctly. Most often, you'll do so simply by adjusting the envelope's shape. See Adjusting Default Envelope Shape.