Post Eleven

Bones or Biped?

I tried a biped and tried to position it into some varying poses as a skateboarder and soon realised the limitations and problem areas that would have arose had I chose to animate my model with this kind of rig. I chose to build the rig and try to understand the fundamentals behind the process.

Well this week has confused the hell out of me, I have rigged my model using bones that I have created myself, Ik chains created from scratch, using the reaction manager and adding custom attributes using the parameter editor, setting up masters and slaves and creating states, linking and aligning control objects, wiring custom attributes and then trying to find information as to why the wiring failed; all because of the controllers and the way they were set up on the default settings and then freezing rotations to split the controller into another controller to carry on wiring. It’s been technical to say the least. I have had to try to get to grips with these new techniques and try them out and try to understand the reasoning behind this and this has taken me some frustrating hours of ‘Why isn’t this working!’.

Although I am learning and do not quite understand it all, there are some complex areas that are just too heavy and time consuming so I have been simplifying the process as much as possible. I am using a wide range of tools in 3ds max; I am starting to see how my character will move, what its limitations are, Best of all are the control objects; these have been set up pretty sensibly to help with the animation at later stages, rotations and positioning should now be really easy.

In my next post I will try to explain how and why I have set up my characters arms, wrists and fingers and by using custom attributes I am able to move the fingers; so when I am animating my skater holding his skateboard I will not have to touch the fingers to rotate or position them as I will have already created the attribute to rotate the finger into pre-specified poses. This area has taken me some time because I hit many problems and just couldn’t understand what was going wrong because it was and is still so new to me.