Parameter wiring on local axis?

Adina

Hi guys. I hope someone can help me with this topic. I haven`t found any solutions yet. I`m working with max 2009 btw. currently im building controls for my already skinned biped. i want to control his fingers with a slider wired to the local (x)rotation -axis of his finger. but atm im only able to wire to the world rotation axis.

does anyone know how to change the world axis that it has the position of th local axis or any other way this would work? I`ve already tried it with the reaction manager but strangely when i m using a biped with it it always gets an offset while posing until im scrubbing the timeline. so this wont work. thank you so much for your help.

Mark Dygert

Local X rotation on a biped finger twists the finger, Local Z curls and Local Y rotates it side to side.

On a biped it will require a sub-animation controller, before you can wire anything to it. Without it you get "available". Even with the right sub anim controller it only works on the local axis there is no possible way to wire to the world.

So how did you wire a biped to the world axis?

Are you sure you are using the reference coordinate system correctly? It should be set to local. Sounds like you're set to view or world and that is throwing everything off.
http://3dsmaxdesign.blogspot.com/2009/01/concept-of-coordinate-system-in-3ds-max.html

As for the trouble with reaction manager, offset how? As in position or rotation? You should be able to create a resting or base state and then create a new state for each of the operations.

Adina

hi vig- thanks a lot for your quick answer. sorry i forgot to mention it. i already added a "euler xyz" controller on the rotation list. perhaps that s the wrong one? because when i wire it it does not rotate on the local axis. it is rotating- but not the way i want it. i added some screenshots to make it clearer.
and i also added some screenshots to show you what happens with the reaction manager.

Mark Dygert

Freaky, it does it for me too.

It rotates -180 when it should rotate only -90. Its set to -90 in reaction manager. Setting it to -45 (half) actually rotates it -90.

I wonder if they broke something when they added the extra digits to hack in metacarpal bones in 2010?

I've got to head out but I'll look into tonight when I get home.

Adina

got the same probs in mal 2009 too - already tried it.
anyone got a good idea how to solve this or knows a good "hand selection" script? tried the ones i found on scriptspot - one didnt work and the other only works with 4 fingers and one thumb.

Mark Dygert

I officially bugged it the other night so hopefully they'll be on it... The only work around I could come up with was to half the degree reaction when dealing with -X rotation on biped fingers.

It's crap like this that give biped a bad name. It's a good rig but damn this stuff is annoying. I've been having problems loading list controllers on a biped via maxscript turns out they added the functionality to the UI but not maxscript like normally do.

But at least there is a work around for your issue.

As for selection scripts:
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/andye-tools-v1-0
This has a biped hand selector however it works on standard biped hands minus "knuckle bones" It still works even with knuckle bones added but it counts the first digit as the metacarpal bone and ignores the last finger.

I would love a dynamic selector script that loaded all biped objects, kind of like Worker of Biped but included fingers and toes. It would be even more awesome if it added objects linked to the biped and allowed you to filter them. Probably not a graphical representation, just buttons off to the side...
someday I'll be confident with maxscript enough to tackle that job... someday...

nezach

IIRC Euler rotations are in radians, not degrees. 1 degree is 0.0174533 radians. I don't actually know this, I just typed "degtorad 1" in the maxscript listener and that's what it told me it was.

So use degToRad to convert it over. Hypothetically this would mean you should put "degToRad value" in the parameter wiring box showing in your image. Unlike Vig, I suck and didn't try it with biped so I can't say for sure this is the fix.

Mark Dygert

I'm totally confused now. Using wire parameter and converting it to radians using degtoRad seems to move it a fraction of a degree, as if its reading whatever the final output of the expression is in degrees.

Reaction manager has a "value" column where you plug in "values" it has no way of doing expressions and doesn't really say what is expected to be put in there, I've always used degrees for rotation and it works for every other kind of object, and sort of works for biped. If its meant to read radians it would flip many times over if you plug in a value of 90, but instead it flips exactly 180. =/

Here's a new one. If you rig each digit of a finger to a object using reaction manager and set each digit to rotate 90 degrees, each digit rotates more than 90. So in order to get the middle digit to rotate 90 you have to plug in a lesser value like

Given that other elements of the sub anim list controllers are broken, bugged and half updated I'm beginning to think there might be something deeper than "I just don't understand how its working and the documentation isn't saying". =/

I'll keep digging but unless they have some hidden undocumented way of dealing with this it looks like its just broken, which isn't a big surprise, it wouldn't be biped if everything worked like it should.

Adina

hhey vig hey nezach. thank you so much for your time and help. until now i didnt have thhe time to try the degtorag conversion but ill try it as soon as possible. one of the strangest things is when you use the normal value-rotation reaction is that the finger jumps into its correct position when you scrub the timeline and go back to the keyframe you just set. the doubledegree thing only happens while typing in a value. bot for animating that can´t be a soltuion to alway scrub the timling to see, if every finger is on its correct position

nezach

Ok I've sobered up:) I tried the wiring with degtorad, and what I said works - so far as it goes. It fixes the slider values wired to Euler rotation controllers leading to odd rotations.

It doesn't fix the issues you guys are having with local vs world, reaction manager, biped in general being funky, etc. Sorry for being confusing.

Mark Dygert

Ahh yea that does work, I completely spaced it.
I wasn't using a slider, I was using the Z position of an object to drive the wire parameter and was running into different problems. When I used a slider and converted to radians it works like nezach said. Cool!

Rick Stirling

What happens if you try to assign a new Float Expression controller instead of using wire parameters?

I rarely use Wire these days (or biped).

Adina

Rick: when using biped it seems you cannot assign float expressions.

Vig & nezach: the degtorad really works well on the world axis. seems there really is no way to control the bipeds fingers the way i want it to. so i think ill have to animate it by hand. but thanks again for your help and support

Neox

well you could just use poses instead of handanimating everything