[CATrig / CATmotion] How do you stop the foot bones from always pointing down?

Shuriken UK

Im trying to make a humanoid character rig, one thats going to be walking on the floor. The problem is, whenever you make legs with CAT, the feet are always pointing down, which means its only good if my human character spends all their time levitating above ground or swimming. Maybe if the character was wearing stiletto's it would work too, but thats not the case.

Does anybody know how to make the feet behave normally when using the CAT system. I like CAT because of its flexibility, but this is a serious problem thats going to make rigging "level footed" characters impossible. I don't understand why there isn't just a simple button press, or an option that isn't hidden within a million other subscreens. Its such a simple thing... "toggle feet mode", click, done, you just saved 4 hours of blind experimentation and fumbling in the dark. Anyway, wishful thinking aside lol.

I've looked all over the net regarding this issue, but I couldn't find anything at all! Surely I'm not the only one who's noticed this!? Almost every different way you could write this problem into a search term, I've tried it, and theres nothing! The only thing I found was only LOOSELY related, and didn't have a solution.

Can any skilled CAT users lend me a hand here? I really need some help as I need to finish this rig ASAP and I've hit a complete dead end.

Thanks in advance!

Shuriken UK

Sorry to bump but this is is really important, I've been searching for 2 days now and I still haven't found any leads...

SanderDL

If I understand correctly, you are moving the feet themselfs? You should not do this. Below the feet are helpers (I think they are called platforms by default). These are the ones you should be moving/rotating. Otherwise you get some funny stuff indeed.

If you were moving the platforms all along, please ingnore this.

Shuriken UK

Well I've tried rotating both the feet and the platforms. Yea if I remember correctly, rotating the feet didn't do anything (something to do with the IK chain maybe?), and rotating the platforms only slightly fixes things, but you can never make the feet "level". If you rotate the platforms, the feet swing from "diagonal forwards down", to "diagonal backwards down".

Yesterday I decided to try another long search for a solution, but there just seems to be a complete lack of coverage on this problem.

The silly thing is, I dont know if this is a bug in CAT itself, or its just a feature that needs setting properly. If its the latter, then that feature/option is obviously SO well hidden, that only a master detective would be able to find it...

Shuriken UK

So nobody knows how to fix this problem then? Nobody rigs human characters using CAT? I really need to get to the bottom of this, I've had a character ready for rigging now for nearly two weeks, but I cant continue until I sort this out, and I'm not getting anywhere on my own.

Surely theres SOMEBODY on here who rigs human characters using CAT...

Help a dude out!!! I'd really appreciate it!

e_x

Any chance we can get a screenshot of the problem? Is this happening whenever you create new legs? CAT can do a lot of funky things, especially the legs. Are you putting the legs into FK mode at any point? Also, what version of 3ds max and CAT?

Shuriken UK

Thanks for the quick reply! I'm using Max2011, and I dont know if the legs are in FK mode, but all I've done to create the rig is: 1.Create a pelvis/hub, 2. Create the two legs. This is as far as I can get because the problem makes it pointless going any further.

All the settings should be at their defaults, but I have tinkered with a LOT of settings, after which, I just delete the whole rig (to make sure I dont carry on with a rig with messed up settings!).

Is it because I'm creating the rig from scratch? Should I just be choosing preset rigs? I'd rather make my own though, just using CAT's functionality.

Heres a screenshot of the disobedient foot bone:-



No amount of rotating the platform or foot-bone fixes the problem...

e_x

That looks "normal" to me. What exactly are you trying to achieve? Do you want the bone to run down the length of the foot mesh? I guess I can understand it might look like a bug because the foot bone is rotated down, but that's actually normal. You can move the foot platform and adjust the length of the foot bone to better fit the mesh, but currently, I don't see anything wrong in your screen shot outside of joint placement. The foot is currently "grounded", you would just use the platform, which is the IK handle, to animate the legs. Does that make sense?

Mark Dygert

The link you think is the foot, is actually just CAT's poor visual representational of the foot. It's a link from the ankle to the toes and doesn't visually have a heel or a sole, but technically is grounded.

Bones are just pivot points, some people dress them up to actually look like the things they should represent, others just say fuck it and make something functional.

What matters is the placement of the pivots and the placement of the IK pad under the foot everything else is just visual fluff.

Shuriken UK

Oh cool, thats a relief then, I thought I was on my own with this one! So what if I wanted to add another joint for the toes (so the feet have a better "step" motion)? Sorry lol, I've only used CAT once before, so theres a lot of grey areas for me right now!

Thanks for clearing stuff up for me!

Mark Dygert

In setup mode, Click on the ankle (which is the root joint for the foot) and in the command panel under the modify tab, set the number of digits to 1 and you'll get a toe bone, add more digits and you'll get more toes. If you need another bone in the toe, click the toe and click "Add Bone". Clicking on a hand will let you add finger digits the same way.

There are several root nodes in CAT, for example if you click on the pelvis you can add another leg, or a tail, another spine ect... This is where the flexibility of CAT really starts to pay off because you can create a lot of different rigs with a lot of the "parts" that they have.
Snakeman with a tail for legs and 6 arms? No problem.
Horse? Same rigging system.
Spider with 8 legs and a human rider? Done.

However it isn't rock solid and there are quite a few bugs that they are working on so CAT isn't without its faults but still, it has some strengths.