BonesPro
The ultimate tool for bone skinning in Autodesk 3ds Max!
BonesPro is an advanced, fast, and optimized technology for organic skinning of characters and objects in Autodesk 3ds Max.
It allows you to quickly create high-quality skin meshes through easy to understand bone influence and vertex allocation, impressive real-time skin deformation, and special effects.
What is skin and why is it so difficult to master?
Skinning is the process of assigning vertices of a mesh to the animation skeleton structure. The mesh should deform and accurately follow the motion of the skeleton, creating realistic movements of organic shapes.
The skinning process is an important component of character creation, requiring artists to interrupt the more creative parts of their work and often spend a lot of time on quite technical and repetitive deformation settings. Especially for artists with lower technical skills, the skinning task may quickly become a lengthy and tedious process, adjusting and reshaping through bone influence areas.
BonesPro is a solution for artists who do not want to spend a lot of time on character skinning and want to achieve high-quality skinning results with minimal effort.
BonesPro provides fast results through quick allocation of settings and convenient adjustment options.
The mesh deforms like an elastic skin, avoiding facial clipping and not separating vertices too far from each other.
Subcutaneous solid deformers can handle the most problematic areas in animated meshes.
API access allows integration into existing pipelines, and Teams can collaborate in scenarios without providing licenses for everyone.
BonesPro can be used not only for traditional skinning, but also for many other animation effects.
Subcutaneous deformer
- Skin implants and deformers
For artists, a major issue is the sharp bending of the skin, such as in the elbow area of the character. The polygons are gripping each other, and the tips of the elbows look too round, with no obvious bones protruding from the skin.
For these situations, BonesPro provides you with MetaBones and ParaBones. They allow you to fully adjust skin effects, fill meshes in specific areas, create skin blockers, and emphasize the bone structure beneath the skin. They are completely animatable, allowing artists to create stunning deformations below the mesh. The skin will treat these objects as physical objects and cover them like real skin stretching on the elbows or knees.
No need to adjust countless mysterious settings, you just need to use another grid and push it onto the skin. Fill the key areas of the character with fillers to form the correct shape. Parabones can even allow you to create interesting special effects: creating a mouse sneaking under the carpet, pulsating veins, and even parasites moving under the skin.
MetaBones are lightweight spherical objects that can be used for basic mesh deformation. By placing some MetaBones under the skin to simulate real bones pressed onto the skin during movement, bending can quickly give realistic shapes to the elbow, knee, and finger joints.
ParaBones work similarly to MetaBones, but you can use any mesh you want instead of a simple sphere and stretch the skin on it. This allows you to freely implant anything imaginable into your character. Close to the chest of the skin or emphasize the shoulder pad under the clothing.
Quality and fine-tuning
- High quality mesh deformation
BonesPro uses advanced hybrid computing. This avoids the trajectory of ugly intersecting surfaces, explosive elbows, or unspecified finger vertices flying through the scene. The mesh extends like elastic skin, smoothly bending on user-defined subcutaneous implants, and additional options allow for dynamic addition of deformation effects such as chest movements based on character breathing.
- Visual aids for enhancing fine tuning
You can display a visual representation of deformation forces in the viewport at any time. You can quickly adjust the visibility of meshes, bones, and any subcutaneous deformers to ensure that you always have the best understanding of the components you are currently using.
- Flexible vertex influence
In areas where the basic bone influence is not optimal, you can easily fully or partially override this setting to adjust the skin results. Fine tuning specific areas will not invalidate the automatic influence, and you can return and readjust the total influence of bones on the mesh at any time.
Secondary Sports Effects
- What is a secondary exercise effect?
When the skin is rigidly fixed to the skeletal structure, it looks lifeless. BonesPro includes visual oscillation and shaking effects, providing additional realism to your mesh by allowing you to simulate breathing, shaking, and body mass movement. Simply add the BoneJiggler modifier to any bone in the mesh, and you can use two auxiliary skin motion effects:
This option allows you to add motion delays to specific bones to invoke a higher quality impression in some animation meshes.
This allows you to add motion unrelated to the bone, which can be played even when the bone is completely stationary. Add rhythmic movements to the torso to simulate breathing or very fast effects that make the character tremble.
Teamwork and workflow
We have created a compatible solution for all artists and studios who collaborate with external freelancers or third-party rendering farms. When opening scene files on other computers without all necessary plugins installed, plugins usually cause problems. To address this issue, we have created an alternative BonesPro plugin that can be downloaded and used for free as a replacement for the regular version. It allows artists without a BonesPro license to open and process scenes containing BonesPro skin meshes. This allows one artist to use BonesPro to skin a character, while another artist can later open the scene and use the character (such as animating or editing materials) without requiring a BonesPro license.
This also optimizes rendering farm management. Machines that are only used for rendering do not need to bear the burden of license management or complex settings. Simply use the BonesPro proxy in the local or network plugin directory to render any animation that uses BonesPro skinning.
- Workflow and Production Line
BonesPro can be integrated into existing workflows and production processes. Modifiers and their data can be accessed through MAXScript or c++. For example, this allows you to export the final weight data of the skin mesh to a real-time game engine.
The integration converter of the standard skin modifier simplifies pipeline integration in many cases. Users do not need to use a custom exporter to transfer BonesPro results to other software BoneSPro. BoneSPro users can convert their work into skin modifiers with simple buttons to take advantage of the existing features of the skin, such as using FBX format or directly exporting to game engines that support skins
