Given that there were only 3 weeks left to get everything finished, I decided to research into ways to make the skinning process faster; my search revealed a script for 3DS Max called Autoweight by Kogen. This tool technically makes skinning faster, by allowing you to set up the areas on the mesh that the bones will influence, and then letting the software do the rest for you.
Before starting I watched two videos from the creator of Autoweight, which overall give a brief tutorial of the tool. He made it seem quite simple and straight-forward.
Trying it myself, I specified the areas where I wanted it to affect the bones, creating the colourful image you see below.
The problem arose when I started modifying the influence each bone had on the areas. I noticed that a lot of the coloured areas I specified were not actually linked to the bones, and that the script was ignoring them. For example, on the image below one of the fingers was linked to a loop of vertices around the wrist.
Although I've summed up the issue quickly, it happened to me on 4 different attempts, all giving similar problems. After looking through the forums and doing various Google searches, I couldn't find a solution, nor any examples of it happening to other people. Because of this I decided to stick to a more tradition method, using envelopes that are built into 3DS Max.
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