what is Maya's Biped?

tendercare

hello,

I'm only familiar with 3dmax terminology; what is Maya's equivalent of character studio?

thank you

poopinmymouth

A member of the staff paid solely to develope custom rigs.


ZING!


To actually help you however, I think someone made something called Advanced Skeleton for maya. It's a melscript methinkgs. Try searching highend3d.com for it.

Faucet

Erm... Joints?

There isn't a "Click this button for a fully featured biped rig" that comes with Maya.

Some folks have posted scripts to that make basic rigs. Check out <a href="http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/"&gt;http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/</a>

So no, there's no CS equivelent in Maya, but you'll find You'll find Maya's rigging capabilities are far beyond that of CS.

ElysiumGX

some apps have excellent non-linear animation tools integrated into the program itself, which allows many powerful features to be accessed straight out of box.

thomasp

is it just me or is the majority of those auto-rig scripts for maya totally awful? key this, key that, but don't key that one, or your rig will break down the line. some refuse to work on newer versions of maya. generally there's lot's of clutter, some don't even run realtime in the viewport because of all those "enhancements"- happy playblasting.

so yeah, go, pay a rigger to create and maintain animation rigs for you - or pull your own hair out instead

Joshua Stubbles

Well, if someone just wants to pose a character, they shouldn't have t o build a 150 bone rig or something like that. Character studio is crap, but it's very nice for super fast setups or prototyping.

thomasp

[ QUOTE ]
Character studio is crap

[/ QUOTE ]

care to explain?

FunkaDelicDass

Uh oh, looks like you started an app war tendercare. But yeah, as people have mentioned, maya just doesn't "work that way" when you compare the joint tools to something like character studio. That being said, building a skeleton in maya is butt simple. You should be able to find lots of tutorials on building simpe skeletons. And you'll learn something new!

Daz

Great site: http://www.rigging101.com/ Look under 'free stuff' for some Maya rigging fundamantals tuts.

Dio

I would like to hear this as well. Ive always heard that Maya is much more open ended in its rigging system but I really dont know where the advantages over CS lie. In Max using custom rigs animating tends to be more fluid than CS. With Maya is it in the ease of animating that the strain of rigging is made worthwhile?

Joshua Stubbles

thomasp - char studio doesn't offer the control or fine tuning that a custom bone rig offers, simple as that. It's REALLY good for fast stuff, but there just isn't enough to it.

thomasp

what kind of control and finetuning are you referring to? no, you can't create a six-legged biped with two heads and four arms from biped parts alone.
but of course you can add other objects to the hierarchy as you wish.

in my book:
- animation control is pretty good: no stupid ik/fk switches: just grab a bone, rotate or move it and the switch is done automagically. lock a body part to world space on the fly. no flipping bones. realtime playback performance. proxy mesh not needed because biped bones can be shaped to match the masses of the character
- freely scaleable rig, retargeting of animations simply works, pose libraries, mirror animations, very useful animation layering system, non-linear animations, ...

more complex setups can easily be achieved by constraining another or more skeletons to the biped to serve as skinning skeleton, additional animation skeleton, muscle deformation skeleton, etc etc.

drawback is that it uses the stupid TCB for it's animation curves which per default results in more jerky movements. you can (and should!) tweak it (dio: turn on trajectories from the CS panel to see where the shit happens) but it's not as intuitive as manipulating handles. apparently max8 fixes that.

anyway, setting up a rig like that with "normal" bones in max, maya or softimage will take a long long time and lot's and lot's of knowledge. most animation rigs i've seen until today rather suck for me in comparison to CS, no matter what the software is. so much to look out for, so much that can go wrong. besides the playback performance issue that inevitably comes up the more complex the rig is.

however, if you're the kind of guy who prefers to tweak a rig over actually animating it, then yeah, CS is probably crap for you

sumguy

Maya 7 has full body IK which they yanked from Motion Builder, so it now effectively has a biped. If you're familiar with Motion Builder you should be happy, as it blows away a CS biped in terms of functionality.

I do love character studio. And it's definitely getting better with age.

Justin Meisse

I was about to mention motion builder, never used it myself though. So is motion builder combined into Maya 7 (like when Character Studio was combined with Max) or is it just a few features?

BigL

creature tools:

http://www.ant-online.co.uk/

go to downloads, there is a manual too.

Raven

I'd say the eq would be Bonus Tools 6.0 and 6.5, there are a good number of tools specifically designed to speed up creating skeletons, animations, and skinning.

Can't say I'm a fan of motion builder. It's a very good tool to be sure, but it just handles so differently it affects the workflow.

thomasp

creature tools i found to be one of the few good rig systems for maya,too. but personally i like zooCST more, you can easily apply it to your own non-bipedal skeletons and it has some nice body part locking features. it's far more flexible for setting up your own rig's as well.

from what i gathered, fbik is in maya to aid in working with motion builder. as for animating, the mb ik system is really nice for doing extreme animations but i somehow miss total control. it's a bit annoying to have to lock lots of body parts all the time to prevent the ik from distorting your pose where you didn't expect it to, since it acts on the whole skeleton, unlike the usual skeleton setups.

btw. motion builders ik seems like a blatant ripoff of mirai's skeleton system. only that in mirai you are not limited to those bipedal setups at all.

...and shouldn't this thread move to 2d/3d discussion?