Living with Meters Scale in Max

Malekyth

Hey y'all, this feels like a newbie question but my brain isn't up to the task! It is, in fact, a newbie brain. Aww.

I wanna work with some Dawn of War animation in Max 7. Looking at the Space Marine samples, I see that Relic set its system unit scale to 1 unit = 1 meter, and their standard-issue Space Marine is about 2 meters tall.

Max does not like this scale. My first whiff that something was crazy came when I created a bone at the default 10 size, and it filled the screen. The real problem, though, is that IK is unusably chunky and imprecise at this level. Relic must've animated everything in Dawn of War with Biped ...

How do I deal with this? Working at the game's actual scale seems right out, it's just too small. I've tried fiddling with the system scale in a new scene then merging a Relic-standard character into its more comfortable universe, without the clever results I was hoping for. Rescale Units in the utilities panel tends to tear the scene apart ...

What would you do in this situation, studio audience?

Thanks!

Michael Knubben

Personally, i'd give up and do something fun, but i'm sure there's better advise out there. Nevermind me, i'll just sit here and hope someone comes along with something clever.

Ben Cloward

Our studio also uses 1 Unit = 1 Meter, and yeah, Max doesn't like it very much, but there are work-arounds. After creating your IK Chain object, select it and go to the motion panel. In the IK Solver Properties Roll-Out, there's a group called "Thresholds." Set both Position and Rotation to zero. That should give you back the percision you need to animate with the IK.

Hope that helps!

-Ben

Malekyth

Awesome Ben, that does it! The sad thing is, I did fiddle with the threshold fields, but with conservative things like '0.01' and '0.001'. Thanks for pushing me over that precipice.