Animating with 3dsm 9

brandoom

Hello all,

I've been animating for a while using maya, but just recently started using max for animating.

I'm trying to tweak some fancy spins for my guy, but everytime i move a key on the rotation curve (X for example), it moves the same key on the other curves as well - which then ruins the animation.

Is this an option somewhere, or an awful glitch. Also does this make sense to anyone? lol

Thanks:)

brandoom

also, when i say 'move' i mean value wise, up and down, not along the timeline.

Mark Dygert

Using biped or regular objects? If biped, Quaternion or Euler?

How many tracks are highlighted on the left? If you select just X rotation and only it is visible does it also move the others?

You should be able to have multiple tracks highlighted and manipulate each track by itself even forward and back in the timeline.

Do you have soft select on? But that should only effect selected keys.

Have you tried closing max and restarting? Maybe its a default setting you have to flip I remember having that trouble before but I haven't run into it in a long time. I can't recreate it =/

Hopefully its not a bug...

brandoom

Biped, Euler.
Only one track on the left.
Yes, if the others are hidden, they still move.

I can manually set the value of the key(a) that moves, but as soon as i move another key(b), it will move its self(a) back.

Also i noticed that i can't move just 1 key in a stack, it moves the whole stack of keys.

Mark Dygert

Ah well yea biped... humm... well that explains the keys sliding forward and back together. Welcome to biped.

3dsmax Help File
Biped Key Manipulation
Interactive key manipulation behaves in the Workbench much as it does in Track View. The difference is that you can't move keys beyond other keys. This has always been a restriction of biped animation.

They mean you can't move X away from Y and Z. You can slide XYZ all together past other keys. They also mean this will always be a restriction of biped don't expect it to ever change.

What I do (besides curse biped curves) is create a new key (right click the time slider) which makes it for XYZ and then fake the curves on the tracks so the new key is pretty much null and tweak the one you need to tweak. This is by no means perfect and by all means a disaster waiting to happen.

This is probably the number one thing that sends most people screaming from biped.

aesir

Biped is a really great rig, but you can't animate the same way you would with any other rig. It's just a different workflow. As vig said, I handle much of my curves simply by creating more keyframes.