skinning and rigging

skinning and rigging has been quite fun to learn, and seemed very easy from the exercises I attempted. The issues I had were then re creating it within my design.

I wanted to achieve a very similar effect as too the cylinder exercise I previously did, with a cylindrical element bending when required to make the line which attaches the engines to the 'ship' look more 'flexible'.

The First issue I had was the bones were far to big for the lines, as they are quite thin and long, This meant re sizing the bones to fit within the area required. That proved to be simple to change using the bone parameters. 

Having added the IK solver it appeared to be going smoothly, and thought this would be a really quick and easy task to accomplish. The error happened after assigning the skin modifier to the cylinder, it simply wasn't working as expected, and rather then bending with the bones, the bones bent correctly, but the cylinder simply moved in the direction but stayed straight. Looking through the 3DS max help and tutorials online I couldn't see what I was doing wrong, and in the process changed and ticked a lot of unknown boxes trying to figure out the problem. 

I eventually reloaded the project to an earlier point and decided to run through it again, this time using a new cylinder, This time it worked correctly. The issue was the original cylinder was actually a 'line', which had been modified with the bevel profile modifier, this obviously created an error with the IK solver making it behave in a different way. So I had to delete the original lines on the ship as they were not a mesh which could use the bones technique and recreate them as cylinders and then re-size and move them into position. 

The end result is exactly what I was after, and I simply need to replace the texture. the bones have been attached to the holders on the ship and engines, so when the engines are moved the lines bend as shown in the picture above, this makes it look tethered and will be much easier to animate this way.