Need help in animating a severed arm.

kunglao

I have a severed arm complete with hand and need help in animating it.I have never animated before although my past works i have rigged full character.
I am using Max 2008 and would appreciate greatly any tutorials,links you may have.

Mark Dygert

It depends on what the arm/hand is going to be doing? You should probably just use regular bones and if you need to, maybe use some IK/FK but it really depends on the arm and the motions required. Is it gripping, crawling, clawing, being used as a weapon?

kunglao

hi Vig,thanks for your reply.It is an art test i am sitting and they want a simple animation (no more than 60 frames of the arm/hand trying to crawl).
I have used skin/biped in the past and if poss would like to use the same over.
Any help is warmly received.

Mark Dygert

No sense in dragging a biped along if you only need the arm.

Biped hands are pretty ass anyway its basically just fancy looking bones with horrible curves to edit. You could do a much better rig with bones and actually include the metacarpal bones, which would give you much better flexibility of the palm, much more then bipeds one huge ugly hand bone. You might not need all 5 metacarpal bones but 2-3 might give you some added flex biped just isn't going to give you.

Tips:
Animation > Bone Tools. Is very handy when positioning bones.
Refine inserts bones in a chain.
Bone edit mode lets you move/rescale the selected bones node.
Skin works great with bones.
Use the "Select and Link" and "Unlink" tools to attach/detach bones to each other.