Reusing exisiting Rigs?
Does anyone know how and if I can re-use an existing bones rig from another character in 3ds max?
I'm in the process of building one (my first one with bones, until now just biped) and it's working great so far, but as you know, building the rig and all the controls takes a good amount of time. So I was wondering if and how I could reuse it on another character later on which has slightly different body proportions, I would need to scale some of the bones a bit, but I'm afraid that's not gonna work with all the IKs and controller already in place? Do I really have to go through all this again? Please say no.
I'm in the process of building one (my first one with bones, until now just biped) and it's working great so far, but as you know, building the rig and all the controls takes a good amount of time. So I was wondering if and how I could reuse it on another character later on which has slightly different body proportions, I would need to scale some of the bones a bit, but I'm afraid that's not gonna work with all the IKs and controller already in place? Do I really have to go through all this again? Please say no.
Replies
A lot of people I know in Maya do "scripted rigging" where they build a rig and write a script to basically rebuild the exact structure. Dunno if many people do this in Maxscript, it might be harder than MEL, but then you can do cool stuff like define points for feet/knees/elbows/hands and run the script, it will build the rig around those points so you can change proportions really fast.
Obviously there's more setup work involved there and you have to know scripting well, but once you've done that you can generate any body shape rig very fast.
http://www.puppetshop.com/puppetshop.html