Physique

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:

Physique works with bipeds created and animated using the Biped plug-in, and with 3ds Max hierarchies, including the Bones systems. Physique also works with bones that are not in a hierarchy and splines.