3ds Max Animation
polycounter lvl 9
Okay so I did a few topic searches and I got some great links but I am still struggling with concept and implementation.
(btw I am using 3ds max )
Say I want to animate a high poly crazy detailed object, but want to use a lower poly dummy model for the animation process. How do I transfer the animation from the lower poly to the high poly?
Also how would I go about making my own face rig like the one "max" uses on this page.
Thanks for any and all help in advance:thumbup:
(btw I am using 3ds max )
Say I want to animate a high poly crazy detailed object, but want to use a lower poly dummy model for the animation process. How do I transfer the animation from the lower poly to the high poly?
Also how would I go about making my own face rig like the one "max" uses on this page.
Thanks for any and all help in advance:thumbup:
Replies
Okay so I'm assuming the layer editor would be great for this. When I paint weights though could I use the skin modifier to transfer? Otherwise the 500k+ model crashes my system. Thanks for help so far guys
Weighting... yeah, if you're crashing at 500k you might need to try and find a way to transfer the weights assuming the low-poly is weighted and not just in a parentchild relationship with the bones. Unfortunately I haven't used Max enough to dive into the skin modifier yet, so I'll be no help. You could also try using a medium-resolution mesh with normal/displacement maps as Aesir suggested.
As for the control board its been a while since I looked at LowMax's board but I think it uses splines with a few simple constraints. I covered a good method here: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=1044556#post1044556
Do you mean that you want to use bones to animate a low poly mesh, then transfer that animation from the low poly mesh to a high poly mesh? If so, the Skinwrap option.
...Or are you new to animating and by "lower poly dummy model" are you asking about the bones and control rig itself? If so, you can use skin to bind your uber-high poly model to your rig's bones, then just hide it and animate using the rig itself. (Whether it is biped or your own custom skeleton/rig is up to you.)
This works really well with biped as you can collapse the stack and it stays as a biped object.
Might be true for bones also, but I've always left edit poly on top and toggled the visibility of the modifier on and off to see it with the actual bones. A simple maxscript can help with this.
@Vig Tried using the the optimize method and it works great thanks for the info going to go read the thread you posted now.
@Ryno I was talking about a making a low poly substitute that won't crash my computer.
Here is another question for you guys:
I've seen a few rigs use straight up bones or splines vs the biped system in max and I was wondering how would I re-target from bones to biped and vice versa? I think this would be impossible if I was using splines but can it be done with bones? As well what format do engines like unreal and source use for their animations?
Thanks for all the help again Really trying to strengthen my animation skills after phone interview yesterday. The guy wanted to see some more animation abilities on top of the modeling I sent him so one more trick for the bag I guess
I can give you my opinion of each rig if you want.
Personally I see rigging and animation as two separate disciplines, almost like programing and art, oil and water. Sometimes in the industry places are cheap and hire a jack of all trades to do both... a horrible solution in my book as those people that can do both are really rare. The studios tend to focus on the tech side and they hire a rigger to animate, which comes off as wooden and stiff. But its pretty much required to have at least a base level of both before doing one or the other as a FT job so don't let me scare ya =P
If you have a engine you're using its time to research what it requires and how it treats a lot of rig pieces. Splines, dummies, constraints, free floating bones, gaps between parented bones, ect all should be well tested before doing any animation, any skinning actually.
Source uses a bunch of separate animation .SMD files (bones only) and export one reference mesh .SMD file, then compile them all together into a .mdl file. You can import the SMD's after exporting to see what the engine is seeing. There's some more specific info on the valve wiki if you ever go that route.
As for Unreal there's quite a bit of info on their UDN site.
Personally if you're just starting out biped is a pretty good rig and well documented. You can add bones to it and it handles them really well. It also handles IK/FK blending on the rig instead of having two systems you manually blend between. If you've used a rig with seperate IK/FK systems it can be a bit crazy animating 4 arms but only two are visible at a time. You'll more than likely only be able to set up this type of rig on your own using bones, it drives me bonkers but a LOT of rigs work like that. Biped is nice because its much more simple.
Setting up a rig manually with bones is a great exercise and something I suggest any animator do at least once just to understand.
Also check out CrypticAR & CAT they are both great and easy to use rigs that are better than just creating something from scratch using bones since it saves you from having to do a lot of back end work.
I've used biped, a lot. It is a different kind of rig from I used before it, but once I got the hang of it, it was pretty great. If you hit any snags let me know we can probably work through it, don't worry about showing off early stuff as you're learning that is sometimes the best way to learn! There are a few people here that have used biped before and we can probably all bang our heads together and get an answer.
Also I'm not sure if you've looked around for helper scripts or not but there are a few I can't live without.
Worker of Biped: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/worker-of-biped
Its a handy little floating selection script. It's also pretty good at selecting the pivot points for planted keys.
Biped keyer: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/bipedkeyer-v1-4
This helps tweak quaternion curves which is default for biped. In 2008-09 they added faked Euler curves which work pretty well but because they are really quaternion curves dressed up to look like Euler they can have some of the same benefits and issues quaternion has.
For some things I stick with Quaternion and use this script. It also depends on the engine as to which you can use and what axis order... all good to figure out before animating =P
I strongly suggest taking a few min to learn copy/paste poses, as well as look into the motion mixer. It really does help quite a bit and save time with a lot of things. Because you can filter out body parts based on motion mixer layers, you can apply upper body motions to lower body cycles.
So if your character carries various weapons you do one walk/run/jump and use mixer to filter out the arms/spine and blend the weapon anims. It saves a bunch of time and is super flexible, but kind of confusing at first.
So beyond all greater conscious I was rigging today and I was in the vertext sub object mode of physique trying to paint the weights manually by
After I exited the rollout menu I would reselect the link to see if the verts had taken and they would go back to the initialize settings. Any thoughts on what is causing this? Envelopes work but I can't stand working with them especially in the shoulder neck area.
Use the Skin Modifier. Its had some pretty big improvements over the years and I don't know to many people that consider physique workable. Too bad its still in the biped tutorials...
Let me know if you want to transfer your weights from physique to skin there are several ways to do it, but only worth going over if you're not going to start over from scratch.
Skin actual has vertex weight painting, with a brush, along with vert by vert, loop by loop weighting.
Shift-Ctrl-LMB/drag adjusts the size of the brush.
Shift-Alt-LMB/drag adjusts the strength.
Yeah I'll start from scratch with skin then if I'll get better results anyways I figure the more I do something the better I'll get anyways lol
When painting weights it can be helpful to turn off blend weights if you're having applying more weight to a vert and seems to be locked to a set value.
If you're not a big fan of skinning with envelopes and want to do it all with paint and hand weighting, it can be helpful to shrink the envelopes of one bone, copy it paste it to all the other bones (envelop properties) and weight all the verts to one bone and blend from there.
If the mesh is more or less symmetrical, skin half and mirror it. Great for hands.
Animate your model in different extreme poses to make adjusting weights easier.
If you need to limit the number of bones that can influence a vert set in advanced parameters before adding bones. It defaults to 20, some realtime games have limits of 3-4 bones.
Adding and removing bones after you've started weighting can get buggy. It can be a bit more stable, to bake out the weights (oven icon above weight table button) save them out (advanced options), delete skin, reapply skin, add the bones and load the saved .env file, before picking you where you left off.