[3ds max] Some questions about rigging

[Kazeon]

Dear modelling experts,

A while ago I took some times to learn a bit about animating. I've learned rigging and making a simple stand animation (yay). However I still got some questions about it.

First, is (bone) skinning part of rigging? Or are they two different parts?

Second, is there some kind of bone naming conventions? You know, like, this bone should be named "a" and that bone should be named "b"? Just take a look at my bone naming. Is it proper?
(sorry I'm too lazy to open 3ds max, too long to load)
Or does it even matter?

Third, about vertices weights (skinning). I read a lot blinkboy's animating tutorial. It says something like "In warcraft 3, a vertex affected by different bones should have equal weights". But the problem is, in the model I tried to rig, there are certain vertices which are affected by 3 (three) different bones. So, those vertices should weighs around 0,333 right? However, 3ds max doesn't allow me to input such values (I couldn't make those equal) because if I input 0,333 in a cell, the other two cells are automatically re-calculated (become not 0.333). So, how can I fix it? Or is it even a problem?

 

[GhostWolf]

Skinning is attaching vertices to bones and setting weights, while a rig is the skeleton with all of its possible extra controls and so on.

For bone names - you can probably safely name them like the body parts they will be attached to, with tags like "left" "right" "upper" "lower" etc.

About weights - it's less of requiring balanced weights, and more that Warcraft 3 supports no weights.
As far as we know (or at least Magos' guess), the final vertex is simply divided by the number of bones it is attached to (essentially equivalent to balanced weights).
You'd still want your weights to be relatively balanced, just so the animation in 3ds Max really looks how it would look in-game, but I doubt it will matter if your weights are 0.333, 0.333, and 0.334.