Hi,

I'm rigging a character and trying to mirror the skinning from the left bones to the right bones. It's not working for the legs.

What it ends up doing is binding the right vertices to the Left leg. If you look in the image, you'll see that the legs'envelopes are in red.

The skin modifier mirror is somewhat buggy. Is the mesh reset xformed? It helps make it work. :P

I've had that problem before with CAT, but it was back in Max9 when CAT was a plug-in. I've never had it happen with biped.

I normally ended up cleaning the mesh, (Command panel > hierarchy tab > reset scale/transform). You can reapply symmetry and watch the vertex count (press 7) to see if it changes as you toggle it on/off (light bulb).

But the problem normally isn't with the mesh, sometimes it was CAT and I ended up deleting the limbs on one side and recreating them, even then it didn't always solve the problem, but sometimes it did.

I haven't run into the problem with newer versions of CAT since it was integrated into Max but then the characters I work on are very humanoid and very standardized.

yeah rest xform is you friend and sometimes if you set the mirror threshold too high that can cause it to happen.
also scaling issue can cause problems ie your mesh is too big or small in the scene
but its more likely a reset xform thing
Lastly turn off always deform then turn it on again in 'non' fig mode, then go back to fig mode and then repeat the process.

Oh also don't change or animate the bones on the frame (normally 0) that you applied skin.

Don't forget to set the skin pose of the bones before applying the skin modifier. Before you apply skin to the mesh, highlight your bones, hold alt, right click and choose "set skin pose", then apply skin and add the bones. This will help mirror understand the basic skin pose better.

Any animation you do to check the deformation or whatever should be done after the frame that you applied skin. I normally set keys on all the bones at 0, then hold ctrl-alt-left click drag in the time line to push frame 0 out of the keyable area so the timeline starts on 1.