RIGGING THE ARMS IN 3DS MAX

I – Lowpoly mesh preparation

The first thing to think about is what neutral pose the arms will be in. You can either create them in a straight neutral pose which is easier for the rigger but harder for the sculptor, or you can create them in a pose that fits the position they’re most likely to spend the most time in. I went for the latter. Just note that it’s harder to accurately rig a pre-posed arm.

When you create the lowpoly for your FPS arms rig, you should double-chamfer knuckles and other areas that will be prone to large angle movements. You can blend these double-chamfered polygons between adjacent bones later with minimal UV stretching.

Before you begin rigging the arm, ensure that you’ve created the UV map and textures for the lowpoly as you normally would. The diffuse texture will be very useful in 3DS Max when looking out for UV stretching. UV stretching happens when a bone is given too much weighting on a particular face or set of vertices on the lowpoly. You want to avoid this as much as possible for a good rig.

II – Creating a custom skeleton in 3DS Max for FPS arms

1. Make sure your arms are centred at 0,0,0. There is a cheap way to do this. First, make sure all elements of your arm mesh are within the same object.