3DSMax Biped - Removing single key
polycounter lvl 9
Hi tech talk,
I have been animating in 3DSMax lately with Bipoed, and there's something that really frustrates me right now:
I have a bunch of keys set on my spine1 and spine2 bones. When I want to remove a key from spine2 that sit at the same time as a key on spine1 it removes keys for all the bone chain.
It does that with arm and leg chains too. That seem to happen to me with biped only, this sharing of keys..
I'm a noob at animating in Max, so I believe I must be missing the right button on/off somewhere. This cant be the way everybody works, is it?
Anyways, any help is greatly appreciated! I did a forum search and google search but was not succesful on this matter.
I have been animating in 3DSMax lately with Bipoed, and there's something that really frustrates me right now:
I have a bunch of keys set on my spine1 and spine2 bones. When I want to remove a key from spine2 that sit at the same time as a key on spine1 it removes keys for all the bone chain.
It does that with arm and leg chains too. That seem to happen to me with biped only, this sharing of keys..
I'm a noob at animating in Max, so I believe I must be missing the right button on/off somewhere. This cant be the way everybody works, is it?
Anyways, any help is greatly appreciated! I did a forum search and google search but was not succesful on this matter.
Replies
Its one of e broken features of the biped . turning on separate fk tracks is as safe as turning the euler mode on. Which is like running with sharp scissors half naked on crystal meth under a giant storm.
Its just how the biped was made the best pro tip i can give you is; forget about it, you'll get used to it
Animating with the biped isnt reaaly elegant and your timelie will always be filled with tons ( and sometimes nearly useless ) of keys but thats just the way it is. A few days ago i had a chat with one of the senior animator at the studios I work at and he was telling me about how he usually ends up having a keyframe at every 2 frames even on a simple animation just because he wanted thing things to move and interpolate in a certain way.
Yeah in my case it's more of I placed a key on spine2 at the same place as spine1 and want to move it two frames but it moved the whole thing. In that case it was easier to load a previous save and just recreate the key at the righ place directly.
I'm very keen on working with clean timelines as I come from Maya when animating things, this probably made me this way. Biped is indeed a bitch to master but I can start to see the speed improvement I get from doing proper poses and animate from that using the pose sets. I'll get there
What biped gives you in:
Ease of setup
Twist bones
Simple rig interaction
Share animations between bipeds, even of different structures
Copy paste poses
Layers
Easy motion capture loading and motion mixing
In place mode...
... it takes away in a quite a few other areas. You work with the bad to get the good and you work around it the best you can. I have to say curve editing in max is already a frustrating exercise but curve editing a biped will make you rip your hair out at times.
The curve editor in max also causes the viewport to lag like crazy. The more things you have selected the slower it will go.
Biped also has it's own curve editor (workbench) with tools that only work in quaternion mode (key reduction ect), but then the standard curve editor isn't really set up easily to deal with biped (it doesn't display the COM tracks easily along with a bunch of other hiccups).
Working in Euler mode in the standard curve editor or in workbench gets pretty messy.
I am trying to use workbench so that I can loop the curves outside the time range I work with. Like you would in maya and be able to loop a tiny segment over a longer one or connect two ends of a track..
I found this Curves-Out-Of-Ranges-Type in the workbench but it doesn't do anything if I put it to loop.
Also do you guys have any idea how to actually edit tangents on curves in workbench? I have them enabled and they don't show when I select a point on a curve?
As far as I know, out of range curves don't work with biped's normal controllers but it will work on sub-animation controllers, which is probably useless for what you want, unless you want to do all of your animation on the sub-animation controllers... I wouldn't recommend that, I haven't ever tried it.
But just incase you are curious, in the biped menu expand "assign controllers" and then tree down until you see an "available" track, click it then click the "assign controller" button at the top of the list. Pick a controller type and then assign it.
In keyframing tools, turn on manipulate sub-animations to remove the tracks if you want to get rid of them.
This part of the 3dsmax help doc goes into a bit more detail:
http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/12/ENU/3ds%20Max%202010%20Tutorials/files/WSf742dab04106313311b7d0e3112a19e3350-7ff0.htm
I only really use sub-animations to add an animate-able scale parameter to biped to give it some squash and stretch, or to add a noise controller to give the biped the shakes. Outside of that I don't really use sub-animation controllers on bipeds.
That depends on what the biped piece is set to, Euler or Quaternion.
If it is set to Euler:
You should get handles when you select the key. If the handles don't appear then the tangent is probably set to slow or step and you need to pick spline.
If it is set to Quaternion:
Then you have to right click the key and adjust the TCB values along with the ease in/out to build the curve, which is one of the key reasons animators hate working in Quaternion but it does effectively combat gimbal lock and was originally what allowed for biped to do some pretty advanced stuff like planed keys, no IK/FK limb snapping/switching.
There are a few operations that will cause max to recalculate the biped curves which often will obliterate any tweaks you have made to the curve handles. I can't think all of them off the top of my head but watch out, there are times I end up editing curves two three four times because I flipped a switch somewhere inside of biped. Toggling back and forth between Eular and Quaterion will do it, but there are other operations like jumping in and out of mixer mode and figure mode, saving and loading a biped animation will sometimes do it. I'm not surprised when biped forgets the edits to the curves and I have to redo them... it's lots of fun redoing your curves 2,3,4,5 times.