Max comes with excellent tutorials on getting started with Biped. Go to Help/Additional Help/CS Tutorials. But to answer your question directly, you can't move the Pelvis object. You can only rotate it. You'll need to move the COM object into place.
also keep in mind you're system units and object size. realsitic results from most any materials (A&D are fantastic.) rely also on correct object size. try some of the templates built in to the Arch & Design mat. those are great start points.
If you press "7" on your keyboard with an object selected, it toggles an in-viewport polygon counter on and off. If you have an Editable Poly object, it will tell you how many polygons you have selected in any particular area, it's in the Selection rollout in the Modify panel.
I understand, I'd have to actually try it out but I suspect you can do something with object positions and a some UVs to help with keeping the texture stuck to objects. you'd need another solution for the sky if your camera is going to be freely moving but that'd be relatively simple I think (some sort of squashed…
What do the UVs look like? Straightening UV borders and aligning them with the pixel grid can help reduce artifacts on seams. Another thing would be to move seams to areas were they are less prominent. Yet another approach, that becomes interesting when the object has repeating parts (tiling border strip around the…
I'll just update my post to help the community. I managed to use a simple "connect" in the compound objects menu. I created two mesh objects deleted some faces then connected them, you can change the tension and segments of the bridges to make it look like stretching gum.
Yep, you can do that. Multi/sub-object is essentially identical to using multiple meshes - each multi layer has its own shader and textures and are drawn separately. Anything that two meshes can do (except be drawn separately!) a multi/sub-object mesh can do.
The same name thing is the problem. I run into this a lot sending models back and forth in maya and mudbox. IME once you try it, it seems like maya gives up on the whole object until you reopen the scene. Rename the object in your scene each time and it should be good.
After some playing around I can only assume it's down to the number of light sources in the scene - if I rotate the object 180, the shadows then appear on the front of the object :poly118: I s'pose all all I'm looking for now is some validation that I'm not doing things completely wrong?!
It's worded in a confusing way. The way it talks about ratio and hardware that may be slow with only one feature, I think they mean "use the same amount of simple-material objects and complex-material objects", as that's the safest choice when you don't know the size and speed of the memory, CPU and GPU.