Weird biped movement

TripleAs

Hey guys, I'm a beginner animator and I was wondering if someone could help me out with this...
I'm making a couple animations for a unity game character and some of them have to be loopeable. I normally don't have problems with that (I use the posture copy-paste feature a lot though) but for some reason it doesn't work now
The biped is doing some kind of rotation with its arm (at about frame 145) that isn't on any of the keys in the time slider thingy. I though it could be on the very root of the biped but it wasn't. I tried a lot of weird switches and that didn't work either, so... :S

Here's a link to the max file:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32531558/Julie.max

I'm guessing it's something really stupid but I seriously don't know how to fix it.
Btw, the walk-cycle is supposed to be from frame 110 to 149 and it's not really nice, but I'm more concerned about fixing the weird arm movement first.

Thanks in advance

Mark Dygert

That is curve interpolation. You would need to modify the curve so it doesn't ease into the motion but starts right on that key.

To access the workbench click on a biped piece, click on the motion tab, then click the workbench button.

This will pop up:


You'll need to select each biped piece and set the tension to 50 to clamp the motion and stop it all.

This can be kind of tedious, so people have written some handy scripts. This is one of the greatest little script ever written for working with biped in TCB.

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/bipedkeyer-v1-4

These are presets so you don't even need to open up workbench to edit the curves.

What you do:
Select the pieces you want to edit, might as well select the whole biped.
Move the time slider to the right key.
Click the preset, in this case you want "Tension 50".

You can also change your biped to work in Euler (pronounced Oiler) curves which give you bezier handles instead of TCB values. Euler curves are what every other object uses inside of max, so biped is a bit of an oddball when it defaults to Euler. Animators normally like Euler and often switch to it, but since it sounds like you are pretty new to curve editing it probably doesn't matter too much...

monster

Depending on what you are going for, changing the Continuity to 0 is like using a linear key, and changing the Tension to 50 is like using a Slow In/Out key.

Umar6419

I remembered my start with biped/....

TripleAs

Hey guys, thanks a lot for the help, it was a bit... too complete, like, I was scared at first because it seemed like a lot of meat and potatoes but finally I could fix it so I'm pretty happy about it.
Also, do you guys recommend any other sites to learn about bipeds apart from traptcg.com?
I want to learn as much as I can about them

monster

Not much in the way of Biped tutorials. In general, I key the entire Biped every 3-5 frames with a clear and balanced pose. When I'm done with the animation I might offset a few keys for overlapping motion. The job doesn't usually allow for any more time for love then that.

But if you have a question just post it here, one of us will get to it.

CGSociety has a good high traffic Max forum as well. But many times your questions will get bumped to page 10 within an hour.

Mark Dygert

Yea pretty much what monster said, there might be a handful of tutorials out there, but the tutorials included with max are probably the best.

I got this as a gift a while back but already knew most of the tips and tricks it used =/
http://books.google.com/books/about/3ds_Max_Animation_with_Biped.html?id=ZuyEcCpI44MC

I use the copy paste pose library quite a bit, sometimes just to get a key on every biped piece for a given pose... I'm lazy like that... ha!