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Use the Physique modifier to attach a skin to a skeleton structure such as a
biped. The skin is a 3ds Max object: it can be any deformable, vertex-based
object such as a mesh, a patch, or a shape. When you animate the skeleton
with skin attached, Physique deforms the skin to match the skeleton's
movement.
Animating the underlying skeleton enables you to animate a single contiguous
model of a character that bends, creases, and bulges about an arbitrary number
of joints within the attached skeleton.
With Physique, you can define how the skin behaves when it deforms. For
example:
■ You can make portions of the skin solid, excluding them from Physique's
deformation, though solid portions still move along with the root node
of the skeleton they are attached to. These solid portions are said to be
root vertices.
■ You can make portions of the skin deformable. They move with the
deformation spline, the smooth curve running through the links of the
skeleton they are attached to.
■ You can make portions of the skin rigid, directly moving along with the
skeleton they're attached to.
4604 | Chapter 17 character studio