3ds Max Animation Custom Rig Issues

KADalicious

I've been building my custom rigs around the methods taught in digital tutors course but I've been wondering if there is an easier way to animate these kind of rigs. Whenever you make a walking animation or anything that needs to be mirrored (unlike with biped) you have to plug in the location coordinates of each control into the opposite one for the correct time. Plugging away for so long just to mirror the leg movements of one side to another is exhausting.

With Biped you can just copy paste mirror making it extremely simple but at the same time Biped can be very fidgety with its foot movement and staying still. Is there some way that you can build custom rigs with controls and not have to go through the process of copy pasting x,y, and z coordinates all the time?

tigerheart

I am actually working on a tool to create custom rig, and I'm stuck with this kind of problem too. I didn't find an answer yet but i'm still atrying. I have made a thread here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=143933 , maybe something will come up.

monster

Creating a custom rig in 3ds Max that can mirror is fairly complex. If you can find some of Paul Neale's old rigs Maxine or Maxwell you can see the code he uses to do it.

You've got a couple of alternatives though.

1. Use Biped or CAT that come with 3ds Max.
2. When I use a rig that doesn't have mirroring I animate both sides at the same time and then use Out Of Range curves to offset half of the body.

As a tech animator I've got my own autorigging system that has mirroring built into it. I plan on releasing the system eventually.