I just bought a new Wacom Bamboo tablet the other day and am very pleased with it so far. I have never been a heavy tablet user, and I’m not sure that I ever really will be, but following the advice of Paul Neale I started using my old Graphire to do skinning and creating morph targets.
As mentioned above, I used to own old-school Graphire tablets. They were only the smalls sizes, and I only ever used them for creating texture maps. I never thought of using them in Max because I just couldn’t see how navigating 3d space could comfortably work. I’ve had my Graphire4 sitting around since college, collecting dust, and had never even considered trying it for skinning.
After mapping my main pen button to middle-click and secondary button to right-click navigating 3d is a breeze. I’m still not totally comfortable with it yet, but am quickly adapting. I’ve started building more small macros for skinning so I can quickly access tools through quads with my pen rather than having to visit the modify panel for things that I often would with my mouse.
The pen is a completely different workflow from the mouse. Its a lot more free-flowing and really speeds things up. I’m finding lots of slow spots with my workflow that I never noticed before when using a mouse.
Anyways, happy with my purchase and would recommend others to try out their tablets too. It will feel weird at first, but give it a day or two before giving up on it. Make sure you install your latest tablet drivers, enable pressure sensitivity, and set it to affect strength when skinning. The pressure sensitivity settings can be found in your painter options in Max.
On a related note: the multi-touch input is a cool gimmick, but sucks terribly with Max. Don’t expect much from it.
