Rigging - Player Ship

Here you can see the skeletal mesh that encompasses my Player Ship.

It's an evolution on the last testing rig I made for the previous flight test. 

This time it takes into account the turrets, foot and wings at the back.

Below is a picture of the rig inside the Player Ship:

I took a much more comfortable root in the rigging/bone weighting method utilising an amazing piece of MEL script for Maya that allows you to allocate weighting in a manner exact to 3dsMax.

I was having a great deal of issues getting used to bone weighting using the 'Paint Weights Tool' / Component View, so after some digging around on the net, I found this very useful script!

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/max-skinning-weight-tool-for-maya--2

Also when dealing with non-organic stuff where it's just needed to weight all of sections to 1 and the model has verts that crossover in places, it is a pain in the ass to swing around your model looking for all the verts to select.

 

The method I took was of simply selecting the faces for the verts I wanted then (making sure I'm in polygon mode) > Select > Convert Selection > Vertices! (Hours saved!). 

Then it was just a case of applying the appropriate weighting to the appropriate bones!

Guess theres no more...
*put on sunglasses*
Weight-ing around!