Skinning/mocap question

Japhir

Hey guys,
i'm trying to skin a guy i'm working on to a biped, and i was wondering:
how do i apply a mocap to the biped, so i can check how my skinning works, and then get rid of it again? so far i had to try and load it, then undo the loading--> change the skinning --> load it again, but i want to be able to change it while it's being deformed.
i'm using max9.

simple question, but it's been a while since i skinned a character. (or anything for that matter)

Rick Stirling

Select a biped bone, then if in figure mode, go out of figure mode.

In the biped motion panel open the Keyframing tools tab. There are two white boxes that look lilke erasers. It's one or the other (or both?) of those.

Toggle figure mode on and off and you'll find the animation is gone.

aesir

You create your biped and pose it while the figure mode is enabled. You move the bones around while it's disabled. To bring it back to the skin pose, you hit the figure mode button again. Changes made to pose while in figure mode become the new figure mode.

Dont bother with an animation to check skinning. Just as you skin, constantly pose your model in extreme poses. Keep moving it around as you go. It doesn't need to be in a T-pose as you adjust weights.

For normal bones you would have saved the skin pose in the animation menu btw.

Japhir

thanks!

Rick Stirling

Sorry, missed the bit about loading the anim, I just saw the erasing bit.

to load, while not in figure mode use the Load file icon.

Mark Dygert

You also can save out bip files (Biped rollout > Save File) and reapply them to any biped (Biped rollout > Load file). You can load bip's in as Motion Capture also. So if you have a set of animated extreme poses saved, you can load that into any biped you're working on in the future and not have to worry about setting up the animations again.

You can also load the files into Motion Mixer (Biped Apps rollout > Mixer) and then toggle on and off mixer mode (Biped rollout > Mixer Mode) which switches between playing the clips in Motion Mixer and playing the key'ed animations in the anim bar.

So what I typically do when skinning is load some stock animations into the Motion Mixer. Run, walk, jump. I then load the extreme poses into the biped and its a snap to toggle between the three modes.

Since you're working with biped I also suggest checking out this VERY handy biped part selection script. It gives you a nice little interface to select biped pieces. without having to hunt around in your scene.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/worker-of-biped

Shift-click a link and it selects the children also.
Ctrl-click allows you to select a few different pieces.