Isolating parts of a mesh while skin weighting [3DSMax]

Rigging
#1

I just finished skin weighting a female charcater with long hair falling on her shoulders and face
for game engine pruposes this had to be a conitguos mesh, so the hair was not a seperate mesh.
It was very hard to skin to the hair bones without accidentally grabbing verts form the shoulders/back/neck/face

I tried using an edit mesh modifier to hide the faces i wasn’t working on,
but with the skin modifier active I could still select hidden verts.

how can I isolate verts form the mesh while skinning, so they cannot be selected?

#2

You could just select all of the body verts on the base mesh before skin and use the absolute-transform box to move them away exactly 20 units or whatever so it’s out of the way. Then when you’re finished just move them back by doing -20 units. Kinda cheap but it should work fine if you can’t find any more elegant options

#3

Adding an edit poly mod below the skin and hiding the faces in that should work fine too, then you can just toggle the modifier on and off as you need it. The only thing it won’t work for is the grow selection function but for just selecting verts it’s OK.