3ds max animation questions - mocap
Have some questions regarding animation and key manipulation for 3ds max. I am only using max for animation because i still prefer maya for anything i cant do in zbrush/3dcoat. So instead of perusing the interwebs further i thought i would just ask some short questions.
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How do i delete keyframes?
How do i move keyframes?
Why does the footstep button go away when i've loaded in mocap?
How do i get the footstep button back?
How do i make the biped stand in once place while its doing its animations (for premade animations made with footsteps and mocap)?
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I think that's it, thanks for any direct help, or websites you can refer me to.
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How do i delete keyframes?
How do i move keyframes?
Why does the footstep button go away when i've loaded in mocap?
How do i get the footstep button back?
How do i make the biped stand in once place while its doing its animations (for premade animations made with footsteps and mocap)?
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I think that's it, thanks for any direct help, or websites you can refer me to.
Replies
Select the object(s), then in the timebar select the keys, drag them with left mouse. Shift drag to clone them.
Skipping the biped questions apart from the last one.
Use In Place mode. It's in the motion panel when you've selected part of the biped. Search the hlp for In Place, I think the icon was a few concentric circles.
It can also help to right click the time bar go to configure and turn on "show selection range". This will let you move a selected group of keys, and if you click the little boxes at the end you can scale that selection.
You can only use footsteps when there is no other motion on the biped. So if you want to blend mo cap with footstep animation. You need to do your footsteps (probably convert it to free form motion, watch out for planted keys) save that out as a .bip file, load your mo cap, save that out as a .bip file and use motion mixer to load those clips and mix them together, apply it to the biped to get your final keys.
Motion mixer is especially important for this since it allows you to create transition tracks that will blend from one track to another making it a smooth transition from your footsteps to your mocap without having to manually animate the transition.
Delete all keys then it will let you enter footstep mode.
Watch out for in place mode and footsteps. Footsteps relies heavily on planted keys, those are keys that are locked in world space, when you stop the motion on the Center of Mass the feet still want to move to the planted keys. To get around that, you convert your footsteps to free form animation, then switch all the planted keys to free keys.
Honestly its easier to avoid footsteps and just knock in the 4 poses of a walk cycle and just paste them in as you need them using the copy/paste poses feature in the biped menu. Technically it's 8 poses but 4 are just paste opposite.
And like Rick said the help files will be your friend in finding and explaining a lot of this. I'm not sure there is much of it on the web because the help files cover it pretty well.