3ds Max 2012 Bible - Kelly L. Murdock [302]
2. With the forearm object selected, open the Modify panel and in the Paint Deformation rollout, click the Relax button. Set the Brush Size to 1.0, and drag over the entire forearm.
This smoothes out some of the vertical lines that run along the forearm.
3. Click the Push/Pull button, and set the Push/Pull Value to 0.15, the Brush Size to 0.08, and the Brush Strength to 0.5. Then draw in some veins extending from the elbow toward the hand.
4. Lower the Brush Strength value to 0.25, and extend the vein farther down the arm. Then drop the Brush Strength to 0.1, and finish the veins.
5. With the Push/Pull brush still selected, hold down the Alt key and drag near the wrist to indent the surface around the area where the hand tendons are located.
Figure 26.4 shows the resulting forearm.
FIGURE 26.4
The Paint Deformation brushes are helpful in painting on raised and indented surface features.
Setting Painter Options
At the bottom of the Paint Deformation rollout is a button labeled Brush Options. Clicking this button opens the Painter Options dialog box, shown in Figure 26.5. Using this dialog box, you can set several customized brush options, including the sensitivity of the brush.
Cross-Reference
The Painter Options dialog box is also used by the brushes to paint vertex colors for the Vertex Paint modifier and to paint skin weights as part of the Skin modifier. The Vertex Paint modifier is covered in Chapter 34, “Creating Baked Textures and Normal Maps,” and the Skin modifier is covered in Chapter 40, “Skinning Characters.” •
FIGURE 26.5
The Painter Options dialog box includes a graph for defining the minimum and maximum brush strengths and sizes.
The Min/Max Strength and Min/Max Size values determine the minimum and maximum weight values and paint gizmo sizes. You can define the brush falloff using the curve. This keeps the weights from making an abrupt change (muscles tend to look funny when this happens). Under the curve are several buttons for quickly defining the shape of the falloff curve, including Linear, Smooth, Slow, Fast, and Flat.
The Display Options section includes options that determine the look of the painting gizmo. The Draw Ring, Draw Normal, and Draw Trace options make a ring; the surface normal or an arrow showing the trace direction appears. The Normal can be scaled, and the Marker option displays a small circular marker at the end of the normal.
The Pressure Options let you paint using a graphics tablet with the pressure applied to affect the Strength, Size, or a combination. You can enable Pressure Sensitivity for the brush gizmo. The options include None, Strength, Size, and Both. Using the graph, you can predefine Strength and Size pressure curves and then select to use them.
The Mirror option paints symmetrically on the opposite side of the gizmo across the specified axis. You can also set an Offset and the Gizmo Size. This is handy for muscles that you want to deform symmetrically.
In the Miscellaneous section, the Tree Depth, Update on Mouse Up, and Lag Rate options control how often the scene and the painted strokes are updated.
Primitive Maintenance Modifiers
Included among the Mesh Editing modifiers are two unique modifiers that can be applied to primitive objects, allowing them to maintain their parametric nature.
Note
Using the Edit Mesh or Edit Poly modifiers increases the file size and memory required to work with the object. You can reduce the overhead by collapsing the modifier stack. •
Edit Mesh modifier
All mesh objects are by default Editable Mesh objects. This modifier enables objects to be modified using the Editable Mesh features while maintaining their basic creation parameters.
When an object is converted to an Editable Mesh, its parametric nature is eliminated. However, if you use the Edit Mesh modifier, you can still retain the same object type and its parametric nature while having access to all the Editable Mesh features. For example, if you create a sphere and apply the Edit Mesh modifier and then extrude several