Biped Help (3dsmax9)

Razorb

Hey,

Just to start off with i am no Character artist or Animator! infact im all about Environment art heh but i am trying to do every aspect in a small project of mine.

Ok i will try and explain my problem, i made a character, rigged him using the Biped in 3ds max 9 and when i have finaly come down to animating it, say i want to move the hips down a bit when running for instance.. i dont want the feet to move from its position and the only way for me to move the hips down is to select the Bip01 but that moves absolutely everything... and then the animation starts to get really messy and so on i am sure there is another way of doing it ... something i am missing as i have seen it work fine in maya and once when someone made their own bones in 3ds.

this image might help.

Mark Dygert

You need to set Planted keys for the feet. Click on the foot, and under 'Key Info' in the biped Menu (motion tab, wheel).There are three types, of planted keys:
Planted: object stays anchored in world space.
Sliding: locks the objects vertical movement but allows it to slide around horiz.
Free: This is used to free the object.

Examples:
- If you want the foot to stay in place for 60f then you put planted keys at 1 and 60 as book ends with no other keys between. The foot won't move during that time. If you put keys in between the bookends there will be drift.
- If you want the foot to come loose at 61 set a free key at 61.

Normally I don't leave planted keys in place but turn them on just do do things like you illustrate, then turn the foot keys back into free keys.


More info then what you need but should be helpful.

- Planted keys can also be used on the hands.
- Under IK you can pick the pivot point for planted keys.
- Under IK you can also plant the hands on a moving object.
- You need to set a planted key before you can assign the hand to an object,.
- After assigning, you need to set the blend to 1 it will default to 0.

If you find yourself using biped for a lot of stuff I recommend picking up, [ame="http://www.amazon.com/3ds-Animation-Biped-Michele-Bousquet/dp/0321375726"]Animation With Biped by Michele Bouquet [/ame]
She does a good job of hitting all the basics in nice short concise chapters. The book is a really quick read and easier to use as reference when you need to do something later but don't exactly remember how.

I also recomend getting the Worker of Biped and Biped Keyer scripts. They both make working with biped manageable.
Handy floating selection menu, the dots on the feet set the pivot point on planted keys. But the Edit Keys menu is broken so I suggest getting Biped Keyer.

Quickly lets you assign ease in/out values to biped keys. To eliminate drift, select the pieces that are drifting and click Tension 50, which will kill any easing in or out. How biped handles curves is probably the most backwards way possible, this helps quite a bit. (yea I know you can set it to Euler, but the hands and feet stay Quaternion...wee...)

Alternately, puppetshop is a great rig, now that its free I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone using 3dsmax to animate. It's flexablity and feature set are amazing. It does have a steeper learning curve then biped but its a lot more free to create crazy rigs and support nice clean animation.

Razorb

Vig THANK YOU so much! really that planted keys is so perfect! just what i was looking for! oh and the other stuff i will defo check out v soon just want to give animation a quick go with this defualt stuff first hehe!

Thanks again vig.. really extremely helpfull! thank you thank you thank you!