IntroductionWelcome| 00:03 | Hello, my name is Joel Bradley, and welcome to
Getting Started with CAT Rigging Tools in 3ds Max.
| | 00:11 | We will start the course off with an
overview of CAT itself, and then we will familiarize
| | 00:15 | ourselves with where CAT features can
be found in the 3ds Max user interface.
| | 00:20 | We will take a look at using CAT's quick
rigging options as well as spending some time looking
| | 00:25 | at how to build a CAT rig from the ground up.
| | 00:28 | We will also be looking at how we can work
with some of CAT's more complex tools such
| | 00:33 | as CAT Muscle and the muscle strand.
| | 00:36 | CAT's very powerful animation layer system, foot
pivot setup, and IK/FK systems will all be considered.
| | 00:44 | Using a rig that we will build during the course, we will
also explore CATMotion. Let's jump in and get started.
| | 00:51 |
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| Working with the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a Premium Member of the lynda.com
online training library, you have access to
| | 00:06 | the exercise files used throughout this course.
| | 00:10 | The exercise files are in the Exercise
Files folder, which I have placed on my Desktop.
| | 00:16 | You can, of course, store it wherever you like.
| | 00:19 | There are files created for most movies, and they
reside in sub-folders named according to the chapters.
| | 00:27 | It is not necessary for you to use these files,
but you can follow along using files containing your own work.
| | 00:34 | Let's move ahead then and
get started with our course.
| | 00:39 |
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| What you should know before watching this course| 00:00 | As we work through our course, I will be
working to make you aware of two locations in the
| | 00:06 | UI and their associated
keyboard shortcuts as I use them.
| | 00:11 | However, I will to a certain extent be
assuming that you have at least a reasonable level
| | 00:17 | of familiarity with the 3ds Max application.
| | 00:21 | You should know how to work with standard 3ds Max
tools and perform typical viewport navigation operations.
| | 00:28 | If you are new to 3ds Max and need to learn
how to master these elements before working
| | 00:33 | through our CAT Rigging course, then I would
strongly recommend you check out some of great
| | 00:38 | 3ds Max titles already found on the
lynda.com online training library.
| | 00:44 | Other skills you'll probably find helpful
as you work through this course would include
| | 00:49 | knowledge of all the rigging options
available inside 3ds Max or other 3D applications,
| | 00:55 | as well as some very basic modeling skills.
| | 00:58 |
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| Setting up the 3ds Max project structure| 00:00 | We have set up our scene files using a 3ds
Max project structure so that you can quickly
| | 00:06 | access your start scene files
from inside the application.
| | 00:11 | In this video we will quickly walk through the
process of setting our 3ds Max project folder.
| | 00:17 | First, we just need to perform a quick
check on our 3ds Max preferences, so let's come
| | 00:22 | up to our Customize menu and
then choose the Preferences option.
| | 00:27 | And we just want to sure
we're inside the Files tab.
| | 00:31 | Once here, we want to put a check in the
Convert local file paths to Relative option, then
| | 00:38 | we can simply click OK.
| | 00:40 | Now, we can quickly set up
our 3ds Max project path.
| | 00:45 | First, we need to come up to our Quick
Access toolbar and click the Project folder icon.
| | 00:50 | Let's just locate our Exercise Files folder,
in our case we have placed it on the Desktop.
| | 00:57 | Now we'll just click to select our folder
to set this as our project route, and then
| | 01:02 | we can just click OK.
| | 01:05 | If we click our Application button and use
the File > Open command, you will notice that
| | 01:11 | we are automatically taken to the scenes
folder inside our Exercise Files folder.
| | 01:16 | All we need to do now is select the appropriate
chapter and then the appropriate start scene file.
| | 01:22 |
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1. Introducing the Character Animation Toolkit (CAT)What is CAT?| 00:00 | For those not familiar with the CAT system, C-A-T
or CAT, stands for Character Animation Toolkit.
| | 00:09 | The animation tools that CAT gives to us are
both quick and easy to use, but at the same
| | 00:15 | time they do offer a very high level of
control over the rigging and animation process.
| | 00:21 | CAT gives use the ability to create and
animate with a wide variety of rig types.
| | 00:27 | For example, we can create bipedal characters,
which of course can be the staple of many rigging jobs.
| | 00:35 | But CAT is by no means limited to just Bipeds.
| | 00:39 | As we will see throughout this course, we
can certainly create and animate rigs for
| | 00:44 | our quadrupeds and multi-
legged characters such as insects.
| | 00:49 | We can even fashion rigs from scratch to work
with our own character designs no matter how
| | 00:54 | many limbs that they may have.
| | 00:57 | All of CAT rigs, whether presets or custom
built, make use of CAT's IK/FK systems, as well
| | 01:04 | as having full access to
CAT's procedural motion generator.
| | 01:10 | CAT also has a lot of power and flexibility
when it comes to handling animation through
| | 01:15 | its animation layer system.
| | 01:18 | These give us the ability to blend multiple
animations together to produce a pleasing final result.
| | 01:25 | Just like 3ds Max's older biped system, CAT
can easily work with motion capture, should
| | 01:31 | our current project require it.
| | 01:34 | Some may view CAT as a rigging and animation
toolkit for beginners. Although this can be
| | 01:39 | a somewhat true statement given the easy
to use nature of the tools in CAT, it has to
| | 01:45 | be noted that it is also a very powerful
set of tools from which any rigger or animator
| | 01:51 | with experience can produce exceptional results.
| | 01:56 | In our next video, we will familiarize
ourselves with just where CAT tools can be found in
| | 02:01 | the 3ds Max user interface.
| | 02:04 |
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| Locating CAT features in the 3ds Max user interface| 00:00 | Now that we understand the basics of what
CAT is, let's spend a few minutes becoming
| | 00:05 | familiar with where its tools
can be found within the 3ds Max UI.
| | 00:11 | This will hopefully help us to access them
with ease as we work our way through this course.
| | 00:17 | Let's start with the Creation
tab of the 3ds Max Command panel.
| | 00:21 | This of course is over on the
right-hand side of the interface.
| | 00:25 | Let's just make sure that we are inside
the Create tab by clicking on it, and then we
| | 00:30 | want to drop down and come
across and select our Helpers icon.
| | 00:35 | If we just click to drop down or expand our
list inside the Helpers section, you can see
| | 00:40 | we have a CAT Objects option.
| | 00:44 | If we click to select this, it will
reveal all of CAT's object creation tools.
| | 00:49 | As we need to demonstrate how to access CAT
controls in the UI, we want to select the CATParent option.
| | 00:57 | And then to quickly create a CATParent object,
we'll just left-mouse click in our viewport and drag.
| | 01:04 | With the Helper in the scene, let's make sure
we have it selected and then just come across
| | 01:08 | to our Command panel's Modify tab.
| | 01:12 | As you can see, we now have all the
options for this particular CAT object available.
| | 01:18 | To access options for CAT rigs, we of
course need to have a rig present in the scene.
| | 01:25 | With our CATParent still selected, let's just double-
click any rig option found in the preset rig list.
| | 01:32 | I'm just going to double-click on the clown.
| | 01:36 | Instantly we have a fully-featured
animatable rig loaded into our scene.
| | 01:42 | Simply select any part
of the rig bone structure.
| | 01:45 | Now you will notice that the options in
the Command panel change and are now specific
| | 01:50 | to this particular CAT bone.
| | 01:53 | We would also follow the same basic pattern if we
were working with CATMuscle of the Muscle Strand objects.
| | 02:01 | That is select the newly-created CAT feature and
then use the Modify tab to gain access to its options.
| | 02:09 | With a bone still selected, we
can now over to our Motion tab,
| | 02:14 | and once we click it we have
access to CAT's Animation layer system.
| | 02:20 | Don't worry if we seem to be scheming across
these controls too quickly, this is just an
| | 02:24 | overview of the tools in the user interface, and we
will be coming back to most of them later in the course.
| | 02:32 | With a CAT bone selected if I come over to
our viewport and right-click on it, you will
| | 02:37 | notice that we also get a menu here
that has options specific to this CAT bone.
| | 02:43 | At the top of our 3ds Max UI we have our dropdown
menu system through which we can also access CAT tools.
| | 02:52 | As with many menu items in Max, this is
usually just another way to access tools and options
| | 02:57 | that can be found elsewhere in the UI.
| | 03:01 | If we take a look at the Animation menu, we
can see that we have access to CAT-specific
| | 03:07 | options here as well.
| | 03:10 | Becoming familiar with the tools in the UI
just means we will be able to quickly access
| | 03:14 | them throughout the duration of this course.
| | 03:18 | In our next video, we are going to make a
start at working with CAT tools beginning
| | 03:23 | with CAT's preset rig types.
| | 03:28 |
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2. The Fast Rigging ToolsUsing the preset rigs| 00:00 | CAT's preset rigs can be used by beginners
who want to familiarize themselves with CAT's
| | 00:06 | tools or by professionals who wants
a quick start to the rigging process.
| | 00:12 | Obviously, what we need to know is
how to create a Preset Rig in CAT.
| | 00:18 | The steps we are going to take assume we
are working in a new Max session.
| | 00:22 | In other words, we have just that to the
application and loaded our preset rig scene.
| | 00:28 | First, step we need to take is
the creation of a CATParent object.
| | 00:31 | Let's come over to the Create
tab and into the Helper section.
| | 00:37 | Let's drop down our list and choose
CAT Objects and then select CATParent.
| | 00:43 | As you can see, left-clicking and dragging
it on a viewport creates the Parent object,
| | 00:48 | but no rig is created.
| | 00:50 | I just want to sense this in the Max view
by right-clicking and then choosing Move.
| | 00:55 | I'm just going to come down to the bottom
of the Max UI and right-click on the X and
| | 00:59 | Y spinners to zero them out.
| | 01:02 | To add a rig, first make sure that the
Parents Helper is selected, and then you can come
| | 01:07 | across to the Modify panel.
| | 01:10 | Let's scroll down until we come
to the CATRig Load Save rollout.
| | 01:16 | All we need to do is choose a preset, double-
click it, and it is created in the scene.
| | 01:22 | As easy as that we have an animatable, fully-
featured rig created straight into our scene.
| | 01:30 | You may be wondering why earlier we stressed
we were working from a new 3ds Max session.
| | 01:37 | We made this distinction because if I just
reload our Start Scene file and say No to
| | 01:42 | save the changes, and I come to create
another CATParent but scroll down to our Preset Rig
| | 01:50 | list, you will notice that CAT remembers
our previously created rig, and when we create
| | 01:56 | our new CATParent, this rig is also created.
| | 02:01 | If this is the behavior we want, that's fine,
but to get back to creating just the Parent
| | 02:07 | object, I'm going to delete
the rig we have just made.
| | 02:11 | Before we click and drag in our viewport, all
we need to do is just come back to our list
| | 02:16 | and select this "None" option.
| | 02:19 | Again, if we click and drag in our
viewport, now we just create a Blank Helper object.
| | 02:25 | We just wanted to demonstrate this behavior
to you because obviously it has the potential
| | 02:31 | to confuse users who are new to CAT.
| | 02:34 | The question you may now be asking is, well,
why would you want to use the presets?
| | 02:39 | If we just glance over to our Modify panel
and just take a look at the Rig list, we will
| | 02:45 | notice that as well as variation in rig types,
for instance, the Base Human, and creatures
| | 02:54 | such as the Horse, there is also quite a
lot of variation in terms of rig complexity.
| | 03:03 | For instance, between the Horse we just created
and the Centipede, because of the wide variety
| | 03:09 | available, we can more often than not use these rigs
as a starting point, even when there is not an exact match.
| | 03:18 | For instance, if we were animating a T-Rex, we could
use the Allosaur rig and adjust these proportions to fit.
| | 03:25 | As we can see, CAT's preset rig
types can speed up the rigging process.
| | 03:31 | In our next video, we will look at how we can
start organizing our rigs using custom names and colors.
| | 03:37 |
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| Organizing a rig using custom names and colors| 00:00 | Even if we only have a little experience
with rigging inside a 3d application, we will
| | 00:06 | be aware that scenes can get
pretty complex in no time at all.
| | 00:10 | With this in mind, a best practice option
would be to organize our rigs as we work.
| | 00:16 | I really would strongly recommend getting
into the habit of doing this, as it will make
| | 00:21 | our work and the work of others who may need to
ultimately use our rig so much easier in the long run.
| | 00:28 | First, let's tackle the issue
with actually naming our rig.
| | 00:32 | Good naming conventions will make selection
on manipulation of rig paths far quicker and
| | 00:37 | easier than it would be if we were to
just keep all the defaults in place.
| | 00:42 | If we come and select our CATParent object
and then move over to the Modify panel, we
| | 00:49 | can see in the CATRig Parameters rollout we have
an option for applying a name to the Helper object.
| | 00:56 | Let's give our CATParent the
name of OurRig and then press Enter.
| | 01:02 | One important concept we need to understand
regarding organization with CAT is that it
| | 01:07 | uses what I like to call a propagation system.
| | 01:11 | What I mean is that CAT passes certain
organizational elements down the chain.
| | 01:17 | So, if we now select any bone in our rig, we
can see that it has the prefix name of OurRig.
| | 01:25 | This is true for every aspect of the system.
| | 01:29 | This functionality means we have the ability
to give a number of rigs in a scene distinct
| | 01:33 | names that will separate them from one another
without having to go and rename every individual bone.
| | 01:41 | If I just select all of my current CATRig
and press the W key to enable the Move tool,
| | 01:46 | and holding down Shift, I just copy my rig to
the left and then say OK to the Clone options.
| | 01:54 | If I then bring up the Select from Scene dialog
using the H key, you will notice that picking
| | 01:59 | out the names of individual bones will be
quite a challenge as the rig prefix and the
| | 02:05 | bone name simply run into one another.
| | 02:09 | Worse still is the fact that the body parts
of both rigs are mixed together, so for instance
| | 02:14 | we can see we have
OurRigRThigh and OurRigRThigh001.
| | 02:22 | To fix the mixing problem, I'm just going to cancel
out of the dialog and select our CATParent Helper.
| | 02:30 | And I'm going to name this "TheRig".
| | 02:33 | If I press the H key once again to bring
back our dialog box, you'll notice that all
| | 02:38 | of our bones are now separated
out according to the Helpers.
| | 02:42 | We have all the bones associated with OurRig,
and we also have all the bones associated
| | 02:48 | with TheRig all grouped together.
| | 02:50 | Now, to tackle the issue of prefix and bone
names running into one another, I generally
| | 02:56 | like to use underscores.
| | 02:59 | For instance, if I just cancel the dialog
box and come back over to the name of our
| | 03:04 | CATParent and place an
underscore at the end of its name,
| | 03:08 | and then I come back into my Select from
Scene dialog box, you will notice that it's just
| | 03:13 | that much easier to read.
| | 03:16 | I think the underscore at the Parent level
means we only need to type it once, and as
| | 03:22 | you can see in this list, it will
propagate throughout our entire rig.
| | 03:27 | We can extend this organizational technique
even further and change the name of individual
| | 03:33 | hierarchies in our rig and have that
name pass down to all of the child bones.
| | 03:39 | Let's select the left collarbone of one of our rigs
and give it a more descriptive and easy to read name.
| | 03:46 | I'm going to call it Left underscore Arm and then
place an underscore at the end and press Enter.
| | 03:54 | Now, if we click on any of the children of
this bone, we can see that the Rig prefix,
| | 04:01 | the Hierarchy prefix, and the individual
bone name carries all the way down to the last
| | 04:07 | bone in the hierarchal chain.
| | 04:09 | This propagation concept also carries over when
it comes to creating custom colors for our rig.
| | 04:17 | Artists oftentimes like to use color
conventions to help them distinguish certain parts of the
| | 04:22 | rig at a glance. As an animator, you
may have a certain color coding system.
| | 04:28 | With our bone selected--and we can select any
bone in the chain, it doesn't really matter--
| | 04:33 | let's come over to the right of our name
dialog box, and let's click this Color Swatch to
| | 04:39 | change the color of our bone.
Of course, you can use any color of your choice.
| | 04:44 | For me, because I often use the Biped system
in Max, I'm going to use a standard Biped
| | 04:50 | color and set this to an RGB value of 28,
28, and 177, and then just click OK.
| | 04:59 | As with the naming system, all of the bones
in this hierarchy receive this color change.
| | 05:05 | Let's do the same with our Leg, let's
select a bone, come over to our Color Swatch, and
| | 05:11 | give it a value of 28, 28,
and 177, and again click OK.
| | 05:18 | Now we have the left side of
the rig nicely color coded.
| | 05:22 | What, though, if we wanted to have a single bone
in the middle of the chain colored differently?
| | 05:27 | In this instance, we would need to select the bone
and use the separate 3ds Max object Color Swatch.
| | 05:35 | Once in here, we can pick a color of our
choice and click OK, and you'll notice only that
| | 05:40 | bone receives the color change.
| | 05:43 | This means we have a few extra
options when color coding our bones.
| | 05:48 | Hopefully you can see the potential benefits
that come from having a well-organized rig.
| | 05:54 | In our next video, we will move on to examining the tools
CAT makes available in connection with editing our rigs.
| | 06:04 |
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| Editing the preset rigs| 00:00 | It is highly unlikely that a preset rig type
will fit our character mesh perfectly upon creation.
| | 00:07 | Oftentimes we will need to adjust the
position and size of our bones so that they fit nicely
| | 00:13 | inside our mesh, making the skinning
process, of course, that much easier.
| | 00:19 | Thankfully, CAT makes adjusting the
bones of our rig a rather painless process.
| | 00:24 | If we know we're going to be spending a
lot of time simply selecting and manipulating
| | 00:29 | only CAT bones in our scene, we might want
to change our selection method over to CAT
| | 00:34 | bones to make the selection process easier.
| | 00:37 | To do this, let's come up to the top of our
Max UI and drop down our selection filter and
| | 00:43 | just choose CAT Bone.
| | 00:45 | This means if we click and drag in our scene,
none of our geometry will be selected, and
| | 00:50 | we can only select CAT bones.
| | 00:53 | The simplest way to adjust the bones length
and position is to select it and use the Move
| | 00:59 | tool to translate it in 3D space.
| | 01:02 | Let's adjust the position of
our elbow to show how this works.
| | 01:06 | I'll just press the W key
to enter the Move tool.
| | 01:09 | And as we move it, you'll see that both bones--
according to CAT terminology--now stretch to
| | 01:15 | accommodate the position
in the scene of the pivot.
| | 01:20 | If you would prefer only the parent bone
to stretch, we can come over to the Hierarchy
| | 01:24 | tab in the Command panel and
then select the Link Info button.
| | 01:29 | If we scroll down to the Setup mode section, we can
uncheck the Manipulation Causes Stretching option.
| | 01:37 | Now if we move the bone, you'll notice only
the parent stretches so as to match the pivot
| | 01:43 | location for the selected object.
Let's just come back and turn that on.
| | 01:49 | Another way we can position bones in our mesh
would be using CAT's Forward Kinematic or FK System.
| | 01:57 | Before doing this, however, I'm just going
to press the E key to activate my Rotate
| | 02:01 | tool and then come up to my 3ds Max toolbar.
| | 02:04 | I just want to switch over the
Reference Coordinate System to Local.
| | 02:09 | This will make our rotation axis obvious and
just make our bone placement more predictable.
| | 02:15 | Now we can select the upper
arm bone and rotate it into place.
| | 02:21 | When we rotate our bone, all of
the children follow along nicely.
| | 02:26 | Once we have this bone into place, we can also rotate
our forearm just to complete the positioning of this limb.
| | 02:34 | Rotating our bones into place will help us
avoid placing the bones at odd angles to each
| | 02:38 | other, which can sometimes happen
when using the earlier move method.
| | 02:43 | Of course, which one we use is entirely up to us
as both methods can produce the desired end result.
| | 02:51 | We can also adjust the length
of our rig bones numerically.
| | 02:55 | With our forearm still selected, let's come
over to the Modify tab, and if we scroll down
| | 03:01 | to the bottom of the Bone Setup rollout, you
can see we have three options for controlling
| | 03:08 | the Length, Width, and Depth of the bone.
| | 03:12 | Let's just increase all three again
until our bone better fits the mesh.
| | 03:16 | I'm going to start with the Length to adjust
the position of our wrist, and then I'll increase
| | 03:22 | the Width, and finally the Depth.
| | 03:25 | Obviously, you would want to spend more time
performing these operations, but as you can see,
| | 03:30 | using these controls we can get our
bone to better fit our character.
| | 03:36 | Just above these three controls we also have an option
that allows us to split a CAT bone into segments.
| | 03:43 | These are oftentimes
referred to as twisty bones.
| | 03:47 | The most common example of such a setup is on the
human forearm, which does indeed twist quite a bit.
| | 03:55 | With our forearm still selected, let's increase
the number of segments to three and then press Enter.
| | 04:01 | Now you'll notice in both viewports our
bone is divided into three sections, and based
| | 04:07 | on the orientation of the wrist or hand bone,
we'll now pass an offset rotation up the Hierarchy
| | 04:14 | to give us a twist effect.
| | 04:17 | Understanding how we can adjust and
shape our CAT rig is vitally important.
| | 04:24 | If we get this path to the process right,
chances are that both the skinning and animation
| | 04:29 | phases of production
will go that much smoother.
| | 04:33 |
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| Exploring the 3ds Max Modifier List| 00:00 | The ability to resize bones gives us basic
control over fitting our rig to a character.
| | 00:08 | But what if we could actually shape the individual bones
so their structure conformed much more closely to our mesh?
| | 00:16 | What if we could alter our rig so as to
resemble a low-poly version of the character itself?
| | 00:22 | The good news is with CAT, we can.
| | 00:25 | In CAT we can easily apply 3ds Max modifiers
to the bones in our rig and use them to alter
| | 00:32 | the size and shape of the bones.
| | 00:35 | Let's start the editing process by
selecting a bone we want to adjust.
| | 00:40 | I'm going to select the head bone as our
character's head has a very distinctive shape.
| | 00:47 | Then let's come over to our Modify
tab and drop down our Modifier list.
| | 00:52 | And I'm just going to press the E key to jump to
the E section and then choose the Edit Poly modifier.
| | 00:58 | We can add lots of different modifiers to
our bones, but the Edit Poly Modifier will
| | 01:04 | probably be our choice most of the time as
it let's us quickly adjust the shape of our
| | 01:09 | bones using conventional modeling techniques.
| | 01:12 | Coming up to our toolbar, I just want
to turn on my Graphite Modeling Ribbon.
| | 01:19 | Now I can come over to the Edit tab, and I
want to choose the Swift Loop tool as I want
| | 01:25 | to add some extra edge detail to the head bone.
| | 01:29 | Let's come into our Left viewport, and I'm just
going to click once to create a horizontal edge loop.
| | 01:36 | Then I'm going to move my mouse up and create a
vertical loop and then come into the Front viewport.
| | 01:42 | Again, I'm just going to create a
vertical loop in the center of the head bone.
| | 01:47 | Now we can enter vertex of object mode by
pressing the 1 keyboard shortcut, and we
| | 01:53 | can use the Move tool to adjust the
vertices to better fit the outline of our mesh.
| | 01:58 | So I'm just going to right-click
to cancel out our Swift Loop tool.
| | 02:02 | Let's grab the front row of vertices and move them
forward and shape them to match the curvature of our mesh.
| | 02:10 | Grabbing the middle ring, we can move this forward to
space out our polygons and then tweak their position.
| | 02:19 | Moving to the back of the head, we can move
these vertices up and again make sure they
| | 02:23 | follow the curvature of our mesh.
| | 02:25 | I'm also going to move the middle two
vertices to space our polygons in a more even manner.
| | 02:31 | Switching to the Front viewport, let's just
scale out the center vertices to better fill
| | 02:36 | the volume of our head.
| | 02:38 | Then selecting the vertical ring in the center,
I will first scale them in the Front and then
| | 02:42 | the Left views, again,
keeping an eye on our character.
| | 02:47 | Finally, I will slit the two vertices at the
front of my head and just move them in ever
| | 02:52 | so slightly and then scale them
down so they are closer to the mesh.
| | 02:58 | Once we have adjusted the bone to fit, we can
right-click and come down to Convert To and
| | 03:03 | then choose Convert to Editable Poly.
| | 03:07 | This just collapses the Stack so Max does
not have to perform any extra calculations.
| | 03:13 | Sometimes in a 3ds Max workflow collapsing
the Stack can remove functionality that may
| | 03:19 | have been available at an object's base level.
| | 03:22 | You will notice that with
CAT bones, this does not happen.
| | 03:28 | If we come over to the Modify panel, you can
see Max still treats this object as a CAT
| | 03:34 | bone, keeping all of its parameters available.
| | 03:39 | One option we do need to be aware
of is this Use Custom Mesh check box.
| | 03:44 | Whenever we start to modify a CAT bone via the
modifier Stack, this option is automatically enabled.
| | 03:53 | If after collapsing the Stack we want to
revert to our original bone mesh, we just uncheck
| | 03:59 | this option, and we instantly
revert back to our original CAT bone.
| | 04:04 | Let's just turn that option back on.
| | 04:07 | It is good to note that we can save
and load our own custom rigs as presets.
| | 04:14 | To do this, we need to select our CAT parent.
| | 04:17 | I'm going to press the H key to bring up
our Select from Scene dialog box, and if we
| | 04:23 | look at the icons we can see that our
Helper object is right at the top of our list.
| | 04:28 | So I'm just going to click
Base Human and then choose OK.
| | 04:33 | If we scroll down to the bottom of our
CATRig Load Save rollout, you'll notice we have the
| | 04:39 | ability to both save and load our preset rigs.
| | 04:44 | We can also save the character mesh geometry
with our CAT rig, then each time we choose
| | 04:49 | to load this rig type the
character's geometry will also be created.
| | 04:55 | Given the ability to change and adjust the
shape of each and every bone in our CATRig,
| | 05:01 | we can quickly and easily fit a rig to a
character mesh in a very precise manner, making the work
| | 05:07 | of skinning and animating that much easier.
| | 05:12 |
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| Repositioning bone pivots| 00:00 | When it comes to animation, Pivots--or pivot
points--play a huge role as, of course, these
| | 00:07 | are the points from which an object's positional, and more
importantly, rotational information will be calculated.
| | 00:14 | Because of this, most rigging artists will
want to have an option available that allows
| | 00:19 | them to place pivot points in optimum
positions so as to aid the animation process.
| | 00:24 | However, at first glance, it seems as if CAT
doesn't give us a way of accomplishing this.
| | 00:31 | The truth, though, is that CAT is a fully
integrated 3ds Max plug-in, so we can actually make use
| | 00:38 | of standard 3ds Max tools
in order to accomplish this.
| | 00:42 | What I want to do is change the pivot's
position of my head bone from the top of the neck and
| | 00:47 | just place it just below our
character's ear somewhere around the jawbone.
| | 00:52 | Our natural inclination would perhaps be to
use Max tools such as the Adjust Pivots and
| | 00:58 | Working Pivot options in the Hierarchy tab.
| | 01:01 | These, however, will not
affect pivots in CAT bones.
| | 01:05 | Another mistake that can be made is to try and
use modifiers such as XForm and Edit Poly wrongly.
| | 01:13 | The idea could be to use the sub-object mode of the
XForm modifier and to move the bone and its pivot
| | 01:21 | and then use an Edit Poly Modifier to move the mesh back
to its original position, leaving the pivot relocated.
| | 01:29 | But as soon as we apply an Edit Poly
Modifier to our bone, you will notice that the pivot
| | 01:35 | point snaps straight back
to its original position.
| | 01:39 | The general idea here is sound, the problem is
we are just doing things the wrong way around.
| | 01:46 | To do this correctly, let's just delete
our modifiers and start from the beginning.
| | 01:51 | In our Left viewport, let's make sure we have
our head bone selected, and then we're just
| | 01:56 | going to move it along the X and Y planes and
position the pivot just below our character's ear.
| | 02:03 | If we look in the Front viewport, we can see
these places the pivot just above the neck
| | 02:08 | at the back of the skull, but
it's still in the center of the head.
| | 02:13 | Don't worry at this point that head bone is
now out for alignment with our character mesh.
| | 02:18 | We can fix this just by simply
adding an Edit Poly Modifier.
| | 02:22 | And then we can come into the Elements sub-
object mode and select our head bone and reposition
| | 02:28 | it back into place.
| | 02:30 | We can even scale our bones
so it better fits the mesh.
| | 02:35 | Once we are happy with the new shape and size
of our bone, we can right-click in our modifier
| | 02:41 | stack and collapse it and
then just say yes to the warning.
| | 02:46 | We now have our pivot point placed nicely,
and we still have our bone position perfectly
| | 02:52 | within the character mesh.
| | 02:54 | Knowing how to reposition the pivots of a
CAT bone will give us a lot of flexibility
| | 03:01 | when it comes to setting up our rig to work correctly
with both the skinning and animating phases of production.
| | 03:07 |
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| Using control gizmos| 00:00 | Although direct manipulation of CAT bones
for animation is possible, generally speaking,
| | 00:07 | animators prefer to work with control
objects that make manipulating different aspects of
| | 00:12 | a rig quick and easy.
| | 00:14 | With this in mind, let's take
a look at creating CAT Gizmos.
| | 00:18 | Generally, when building a rig with tools
other than CAT in 3ds Max, Gizmos--or controller
| | 00:25 | objects as they may be referred to--
have to be constructed manually.
| | 00:31 | This usually involves creating 3ds Max
spline objects aligning them to various bones in
| | 00:36 | the rig and then creating a working link between the
Gizmo and the bone or bones that you want it to control.
| | 00:43 | In CAT, however, things are much simpler.
| | 00:46 | To demonstrate, I'm just going to set my
Selection Filter over to CAT bones, and then I'm going
| | 00:52 | to select my hand bone, and right-clicking,
you'll notice we have the option to Add a
| | 00:57 | Gizmo specifically to this bone.
| | 01:00 | Once we click this option, we are given
another box where we can choose a particular shape.
| | 01:06 | Let's choose the circle which could be used
in this instance to indicate to an animator
| | 01:11 | that this gizmo is to be used for rotation.
| | 01:15 | As quickly as that, we now have a control
object that is correctly aligned to its bone
| | 01:20 | and is completely linked up,
ready for animation to be applied.
| | 01:25 | Let's just come over to our Modify
panel and adjust its radius to a value of 5.
| | 01:29 | This just means that Gizmo fits
our mesh scale a little better.
| | 01:34 | We can also make it easier to see by expanding the rendering
top and checking the Enable in viewport option.
| | 01:42 | This will tell the spline objects not to be
visible in the final rendered frame, but to
| | 01:47 | be visible in our shaded viewport, thus
making it easier to select and work with.
| | 01:53 | If these simple shapes are not enough, we
can always come up into our Modifier list and
| | 01:59 | add an Edit Spline modifier onto the gizmo.
| | 02:03 | Then we can come into sub-object mode and
manipulate its shape in the same manner as our CAT bones.
| | 02:11 | We can further customize these gizmos by
locking what they can actually affect on our rig.
| | 02:17 | For example, let's say that this gizmo
is only for the rotation of our hand.
| | 02:22 | First, make sure we have the gizmo
selected, and then if we come over to our Hierarchy
| | 02:28 | tab, we want to come into the Link Info section.
| | 02:32 | Coming to our Locks roll-out, we just want
to put a check in the X, Y, and Z fields of
| | 02:37 | the Move and Scale parameters.
| | 02:40 | With our Move tool selected, let's
try to move the gizmo in the viewport.
| | 02:46 | As you can see, we can't.
| | 02:48 | Now, let's switch over to our Rotate tool using
the keyboard shortcut E and rotate the gizmo.
| | 02:55 | This works exactly as we want it to.
| | 02:58 | We can now repeat this process all over
our rig, adding gizmos, changing their color,
| | 03:04 | and limiting the effects
they can have on our rig.
| | 03:08 | We can even add multiple
gizmos to a single bone.
| | 03:11 | For example, we might want to add another
gizmo to our hand bone that was purely for
| | 03:16 | the translation or movement of this bone.
| | 03:21 | Giving our rig visual controls that can be
made to affect very specific attributes on
| | 03:25 | our bones is a great way to both
simplify and speed up the animation process.
| | 03:31 |
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|
|
3. The Custom Rigging ToolsUnderstanding hubs| 00:00 | When it comes to creating a custom character
rig using CAT, an understanding of CAT's use
| | 00:06 | of hubs is essential as the hub is a
building point for many aspects of a CATRig.
| | 00:13 | A Hub is a special type of CATBone.
| | 00:16 | Typically, it's a foundation from which
spines, arms, legs, and tails are built.
| | 00:23 | A few specific examples of a CATHub would
be a pelvis or a ribcage, maybe even a head,
| | 00:30 | depending of course on
its function within the rig.
| | 00:34 | To actually create a CATHub, we first need
to create a blank CATParent, which hopefully
| | 00:40 | by now we are quite familiar with.
| | 00:43 | Let's come over to our Helper section and
dropdown our list and choose CAT Objects.
| | 00:49 | Let's select the CATParent button and then
click and drag in our viewport to create the Helper.
| | 00:55 | I just want to make some modifications.
| | 00:57 | I'm going to change the CATUnits Ratio to 0.338,
just to make it a little bigger in the scene.
| | 01:06 | Next, I want to orient it so it is
facing the same way as our creature.
| | 01:11 | I'm going to right-click and come to the Rotate tool
and then press the A key to turn on our angle snap.
| | 01:18 | Now I'm just going to rotate this
minus 90 degrees in the viewport.
| | 01:24 | With our Helper in place, we can now switch
over to our Modify panel, where again we gain
| | 01:30 | access to all of its options, but we're
interested in scrolling down to the bottom of our CATRig
| | 01:36 | Load Save rollout, because you'll notice just underneath
our preset rig list, we have this Create Pelvis button.
| | 01:45 | Clicking on this creates a hub in the scene,
which obviously can now function as a pelvis.
| | 01:51 | As with all bones in a CATRig, we can
change its name, which I am going to do.
| | 01:56 | I'm just going to rename it to Pelvis,
press Enter, and we can also change its color.
| | 02:03 | I'm just going to quickly change it to a value of
198, 225, 87, and again, I'm just going to click OK.
| | 02:13 | We also--just like a standard CATBone--get
access to the Length, Width, and Height parameters,
| | 02:18 | which I'm just going to adjust
now to better match our creature.
| | 02:22 | So I'm going to set the Length to a value
of 31, the Width to a value of 48, and the
| | 02:29 | Height to a value of 17.7.
| | 02:33 | It's usually a good idea to make certain
that the pelvis is in the correct position for
| | 02:37 | our character before
moving on to creating limbs.
| | 02:42 | The position and placement of the pelvic hub
will quite obviously impact the position and
| | 02:48 | placement of any limb
bones that are built from it.
| | 02:51 | Coming over to my Front viewport, I'm just
going to rotate this bone around about 30
| | 02:57 | degrees, and I'm also going to move it into a
better position, again, just to match our creature.
| | 03:04 | From this very simple start, we can build
all manner of rigs ranging from very simple
| | 03:10 | to very complex, which is exactly what we'll
do over the next few videos using of course
| | 03:16 | the character art that we
have set up on our image plane.
| | 03:20 |
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| Adding legs to a rig| 00:00 | As we have already seen, CAT has a variety of
tools that can speed up the rigging process.
| | 00:07 | The most obvious of which
are the preset rig types.
| | 00:11 | Even when we need to create a custom rig, CAT
still makes it possible to work very quickly.
| | 00:18 | Let's take a look in this video at
creating a hind limb for our creature.
| | 00:22 | In a typical rig building workflow, we would
usually need to create a number of bone objects,
| | 00:27 | link them together correctly in a hierarchy,
and then create an IK chain that would correctly
| | 00:33 | solve the movement of the limb.
| | 00:36 | All of that could take a while to
accomplish, depending of course upon our skill level.
| | 00:42 | Let's see how long it takes us
to get all of that done in CAT.
| | 00:46 | Having already created a pelvis hub, let's
make sure it's selected in our scene and then
| | 00:51 | come into the Modify panel.
| | 00:54 | All we need to do here is come down to
the bottom and click the Add Leg button.
| | 00:59 | As you can see, CAT creates an inverse
kinematic chain that consists of a three-bone hierarchy
| | 01:06 | and a Helper which you
set at the base of the leg.
| | 01:10 | You may wonder why I am only creating one leg.
| | 01:14 | Well, the answer to this question will
become apparent in a little while, but before we
| | 01:19 | move on, I just want to
change my leg bone's color.
| | 01:22 | So I'm going to click the color swatch and give it
an RGB value of 28, 28, and 177, and just click OK.
| | 01:31 | As you would expect with CAT, the number of
bones in this chain can very easily be increased
| | 01:38 | or even decreased so as to suit the
character design we are working with.
| | 01:43 | Obviously, a value of 2 suits us quite nicely.
| | 01:47 | As we demonstrated with the preset rigs, we
can select any of the bones and adjust their
| | 01:53 | position simply by
clicking and dragging on them.
| | 01:57 | A quick workflow tip would be
to put the ankle in place first.
| | 02:02 | This is so that as we adjust the length,
we don't disturb the position of our knee.
| | 02:08 | With our ankle placed first, we can
then easily work our way up the hierarchy.
| | 02:13 | I'm quite happy with the position of my ankle
bone, but I'm just going to adjust its orientation
| | 02:20 | using the Rotate tool.
| | 02:22 | Let's come over to the Modify panel and
adjust its Length ever so slightly, again, just to
| | 02:28 | better fit our character artwork.
| | 02:31 | Now I can follow the same process and move on to
positioning the lower leg and finally the upper leg.
| | 02:40 | Once these are in place, I can come over to
the Modify panel and adjust the size parameters.
| | 02:47 | So I'm going to do this on the selected bone
first of all, and then I'm just going to reselect
| | 02:53 | the lower leg and perform the same operations.
| | 02:56 | I mentioned earlier that we were
creating only a single leg for a reason.
| | 03:03 | This was because once we have edited a
limb, CAT assumes that we would like to place a
| | 03:08 | replica of this limb on
the opposite side of the rig.
| | 03:12 | Coming back to our hub, if we come down and
click the Add Leg button one more time, you
| | 03:18 | will notice a create select on the opposite side of
the rig with the exact same settings as our first leg.
| | 03:26 | This is a nice piece of functionality
that can save us quite a bit of setup time.
| | 03:31 | I'm just going to adjust the
color of this bone as well.
| | 03:35 | I'm going to scroll to the top of my
Modify panel and click the Color Swatch, and set
| | 03:39 | its RGB values to 6, 133, and 6, and click OK.
| | 03:46 | Again, you'll probably recognize
I am using standard biped colors.
| | 03:51 | Typically, we would probably find ourselves
adding two legs to a hub or pelvis as we have
| | 03:58 | done here, but CAT certainly
doesn't limit us to just that.
| | 04:03 | In fact, if you check out the preset rigs,
you will find the Crab and Spider rigs that
| | 04:08 | demonstrate the use of more
than just two legs per hub.
| | 04:13 | Let's continue the construction of our creature
rig in a logical fashion and move on to adding
| | 04:18 | a spine to our CATRig.
| | 04:21 |
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| Working with spines| 00:00 | Having added legs to our rig, we could start
to become a little concerned that things might
| | 00:05 | get complicated from this point, as now we
need to tackle adding a spine to our character.
| | 00:11 | The complexity of a real spine becomes
apparent when you start to think about how it works,
| | 00:17 | multiple joints functioning as a single
system each capable of rotating more than one axis
| | 00:23 | and doing so in a manner that keeps
them slightly offset from one another.
| | 00:28 | Again, creating all of these from scratch
using 3ds Max tools would certainly take some
| | 00:33 | time and--it must be said--a reasonable
level of skill with Max's Rigging tools.
| | 00:39 | We of course, are going to make things
much easier by using the CAT approach.
| | 00:45 | Selecting our hub, we'll just come over to
the Modify panel and, again, down to our Creation
| | 00:50 | controls, and we're just going
to click the Add Spine button.
| | 00:55 | Just as we did with our limbs, we have very
quickly created a fully functional spine system.
| | 01:01 | The time we have just saved can now be
used to carefully edit the spine so as to give
| | 01:05 | us the best possible control during animation.
| | 01:10 | One important point to note here is that at
the end of our new spine chain, we have just
| | 01:15 | created a new CATHub in the scene.
| | 01:19 | Because of its position at the end of our
spine, we can use this to function as our
| | 01:23 | ribcage, so let's just name it accordingly.
| | 01:25 | In the name field, I'm just going to type Ribcage
and then add an underscore at the end, and press Enter.
| | 01:33 | While I am here, I'm also going to change
its color, so let's click the Color Swatch
| | 01:37 | and set the RGB values to 8, 110,
and 133, and then just click OK.
| | 01:46 | When we change the color, we get a gradient
effect on our spine links, and this is just
| | 01:52 | indicating which of the hubs
our spine link is closest to.
| | 01:57 | Also, if we switch over to the Rotate tool
using the E keyboard shortcut, and we just
| | 02:03 | start rotating our hub, you will notice that it
automatically adjusts each of the spine links.
| | 02:10 | We can see we have an offset rotation that
is propagated down through the spine chain.
| | 02:16 | At this point, of course, we still need to
fit the spine correctly to our character.
| | 02:21 | We really want to try and keep the
complexity of our rig to a minimum.
| | 02:26 | Now we can lower the complexity of our spine by
selecting one of the links, and just scrolling
| | 02:33 | down to the Spine Setup rollout in our
Modify panel, I'm just going to change the number
| | 02:38 | of bones to 3, and then press Enter.
| | 02:40 | To position the ribcage, let's come to the
Front viewport, and using our Move tool, let's
| | 02:47 | just align it with our artwork, like so.
| | 02:52 | As with our pelvis, we also want to adjust
the ribcage's size, so back over in the Modify
| | 02:57 | panel, let's adjust the
Length, Width, and Height values.
| | 03:01 | I'm going to set these to 40, 35.4,
and 23.5, and just press Enter.
| | 03:10 | Once we've adjusted the size, we probably
want to come back over to the Front viewport
| | 03:14 | and reposition it and maybe even use the
Rotate tool to orient it with our image plane.
| | 03:21 | Although our spine links are set to rotate
and move with the hub, we can still select
| | 03:27 | an individual spine link, and using the translation
gizmo yet again, we can move these bones into position.
| | 03:33 | So I'm just going to do this
with each of my spine links.
| | 03:39 | If we're adjusting the size of our bones
numerically, I would really recommend starting from the
| | 03:44 | link at the end of the
hierarchy closest to the pelvis.
| | 03:48 | This is because when we adjust its Height
parameter, it will affect the position of the
| | 03:53 | other bones in the chain.
| | 03:54 | With this link selected, I just want to
change its size, so I'm going to scroll up to our
| | 04:00 | Bone Setup rollout, and I'm going to adjust
the X parameter and set it to a value of 30.
| | 04:06 | This will just increase the size of our spine
to fill out where our character mesh would be.
| | 04:12 | And I'm going to repeat this for the other
two spine links, setting the X value to 30,
| | 04:18 | and then pressing Enter.
| | 04:21 | Because our ribcage bone is also a hub, we
have the ability to create arms, legs, and
| | 04:27 | even additional spines from it, if we need to.
| | 04:30 | In fact, this is precisely what we'll
be doing over the next couple of videos.
| | 04:35 | Again, this just adds to the ease of use and
the freedom we have regarding how we choose
| | 04:41 | to build our custom rig.
| | 04:45 |
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| Adding limbs| 00:00 | At this point in the process, we have a couple
of options open to us as to how we will proceed.
| | 00:07 | We could choose to add our creature's neck
and head to our ribcage hub, or we can complete
| | 00:12 | our limb set by focusing instead on creating
the front legs, which in fact is what we will do.
| | 00:19 | Obviously, we have already covered the
creation of a leg system in this chapter, and we will
| | 00:25 | be following those same basic steps here.
| | 00:27 | However, we are going to take this
opportunity to examine some CAT functionality that we
| | 00:33 | haven't as of yet made use of.
| | 00:36 | Firstly, let's add our two front legs by
selecting our ribcage hub, and then coming across to
| | 00:42 | our Modify panel, we will
click the Add Leg button twice.
| | 00:47 | One difference we will introduce here
will be the addition of an extra bone.
| | 00:53 | If we select either of our leg bones, and coming
to the Limb Setup rollout, you can see we have
| | 00:59 | the option of adding a Collarbone.
| | 01:02 | If I just move my bone further forward here,
you'll notice we have indeed added this extra
| | 01:07 | bone into the limb.
| | 01:09 | I'm just going to right-click
to cancel my Move operation.
| | 01:13 | Of course, typically a collarbone is an option we
would associate with the arm rather than the leg system.
| | 01:20 | But if the anatomy of our design calls for it,
it's nice to know we have this feature available.
| | 01:26 | Seeing as our creature is make-believe,
I'm just going to leave this option checked.
| | 01:32 | If we are going to make use of this bone,
be sure to add it before moving our bones,
| | 01:38 | as enabling this check box will shift
the position of all the bones in the leg.
| | 01:44 | Before we make any adjustments to our limbs, I
just want to change the color of both of them.
| | 01:49 | I'm going to click my Color Swatch
and set the left leg to a Biped blue.
| | 01:54 | That's an RGB value of 28,
28, and 177, and click OK.
| | 02:00 | And then I'll select the other leg, coming to
its Color Swatch, and will set this to Biped
| | 02:05 | green, a value of 6, 133, and 6,
and then again just press OK.
| | 02:13 | Let's now get our bones into position.
| | 02:16 | As before, we're going to start with the last
bone in the chain and just move it into position
| | 02:21 | using the Translate tool and
also rotate it ever so slightly.
| | 02:27 | And again, as before, I'm going to adjust
its length so as not to affect the position
| | 02:32 | of my bones later on.
| | 02:34 | Then I'll position the lower leg into place,
like so, and then finally the upper leg.
| | 02:41 | I'll just move this further forward,
again just matching our creature concept.
| | 02:48 | While I have this bone selected, I'm just
going to scroll down into the Bone Setup rollout
| | 02:53 | and just change its Depth option
to a value of 18 and press Enter.
| | 02:59 | I'm sure at this point you are wondering why
we have added two legs instead of just editing
| | 03:04 | one and then hitting the Add Leg
button as we did with our hind legs.
| | 03:09 | Well, we just want to highlight another
method available to us, the reusing edits on our
| | 03:15 | limbs so as to create symmetrical--or
almost symmetrical--elements in our rig.
| | 03:20 | To demonstrate, with my bone still selected,
I'm just going to scroll up to our Limb Setup
| | 03:26 | rollout, and here you will see we have the options
to Copy, Paste, and Paste/Mirror our limb settings.
| | 03:35 | In this instance, I'm going to
click the Copy Limb Setting's button.
| | 03:39 | And then if we select the opposite leg,
we will use the Paste/Mirror option.
| | 03:45 | This copies our limb settings, including its positions,
size, and number of bones over to the selected limb.
| | 03:52 | In fact, if I move this limb forward,
you'll notice it has indeed added the collarbone.
| | 03:58 | I'm just going to right-click
to put that back into position.
| | 04:01 | It is important to note the difference
between the Paste and the Paste/Mirror commands.
| | 04:08 | The Paste option is for bones on the same
side of a rig or bones that are central to
| | 04:14 | a rig, for example, our spine bones.
| | 04:17 | Paste/Mirror is used to obviously paste
our settings on the opposite side of our rig.
| | 04:23 | Things would not look too good if
our character had four left legs.
| | 04:28 | Having the option to quickly copy and
paste limb information between parts of the rig
| | 04:33 | means we can focus on getting a single
limb looking just right and then reuse some or
| | 04:40 | all of that information to very
quickly set up as many limbs as we need.
| | 04:45 |
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| Adding extra bones to the head| 00:00 | In this video, we are going to take a look
at using CAT's Add Bone feature to create
| | 00:05 | muscle control for our character.
| | 00:07 | But first, we want to finish utilizing the ribcage
hub as we have one more system to add to the rig.
| | 00:15 | This will be another spine that
we will use for our neck and head.
| | 00:18 | First, let's select our ribcage hub, and then
coming over to the Modify panel, we'll choose
| | 00:23 | the Add Spine command.
| | 00:26 | Grabbing the hub, let's just rotate this into place
and then approximately position it with our concept art.
| | 00:35 | Because of the simplicity of our design, we
only really need three joints for the neck.
| | 00:41 | So, let's select a spine joint, and then coming
over to our Spine Setup rollout, we'll just
| | 00:46 | lower the number of bones
to 3 and press Enter.
| | 00:50 | As we have been doing all along, let's just
position each of our spine joints, again, just
| | 00:56 | using our Move tool.
| | 00:59 | Of course, in our rig, these are not
really spine bones, they are neck bones.
| | 01:04 | So, let's just name them accordingly.
| | 01:06 | Coming back over to our Modify panel, let's
scroll to the top, and in the naming field
| | 01:12 | just in front of the number, let's type
Neck and then an underscore.
| | 01:16 | I just want to copy this text
so we can reuse it later on.
| | 01:20 | But before leaving, I'll just add another
underscore after the number 3,
| | 01:24 | and then press Enter.
| | 01:26 | Let's come to our second spine link and paste
in our name and add an underscore,
| | 01:32 | and then we'll repeat the process for the final link
in the chain, again, pressing Enter when we are done.
| | 01:39 | For my personal taste, I prefer to make my
neck joints just a little smaller, so let's
| | 01:45 | set the X and Y fields to values of 20 and 9,
and obviously we want to do this for each
| | 01:52 | of our neck joints.
Let's also make sure we name our new hub.
| | 01:59 | Let's select it, and in the field we'll type
Head underscore and then press Enter.
| | 02:05 | I also want to change the size of this
bone, but I'm just going to adjust the Width.
| | 02:09 | I'm going to set this to a value of 29.8, and this
is just going to fill out the volume a little bit.
| | 02:17 | I'll also just slightly tweak its position
now that I've changed its size, and I also
| | 02:22 | want to change its color.
| | 02:25 | So, let's come back over into our Hub Setup
rollout and click the Color Swatch, but this
| | 02:30 | time I'm going to use RGB values of
166, 201, and 239, and just click OK.
| | 02:40 | We now have a basic head for our character, but we
won't get much articulation from just this single bone.
| | 02:48 | We may want a little more control than
just the ability to move the whole head.
| | 02:52 | What we want to do is add extra bones that
will give our animators the ability to control
| | 02:58 | the muscle of our character.
| | 03:00 | To create these bones, we'll make sure our
head is still selected, and we'll come into
| | 03:05 | the Hub Setup rollout and
click the Add Bone button.
| | 03:08 | Depending on the scale of your rig, you may
or may not see the bone we have just created.
| | 03:14 | If we don't, we can simply come over to
one of our viewports, and using the F3 command,
| | 03:19 | we can turn our viewport into a Wireframe view.
| | 03:23 | Now that we can see through our head bone,
we should be able to spot our newly-created
| | 03:27 | bone in the center.
| | 03:29 | I'm just going to press F3 to come back to
our shaded view, and then I'm just going to
| | 03:33 | align this bone with the upper jaw of my
character, again, just using the Move and Rotate tools.
| | 03:41 | While I'm here, I'm just going to adjust its
size as well, setting the X and Y values to
| | 03:46 | 20 and 9 respectively, and
then just pressing Enter.
| | 03:51 | Even though we are now working with a custom
bone, we can still use Copy/Paste functionality.
| | 03:58 | In this instance, we will use
the bone Copy/Paste functionality.
| | 04:03 | With the bone still selected, let's choose
the Copy command, and then selecting our head
| | 04:08 | hub once again, we'll
choose the Add Bone button.
| | 04:12 | With the newly created bone
selected, let's choose the Paste command.
| | 04:17 | At first glance it appears our bone has
disappeared, but don't worry, all it has done is taking
| | 04:22 | on the characteristics of our original bone.
| | 04:26 | Let's just move this bone into a better
position, and using the Rotate tool, we'll just match
| | 04:31 | our concept art in the background.
| | 04:35 | Instead of adjusting the size of this bone
numerically, I'm instead going to use the
| | 04:39 | Scale tool by pressing the R key.
| | 04:42 | Before I scale the bone, though, I'm just
going to change the Reference Coordinate System
| | 04:46 | over to Local, that way we can
just scale along the bone's axis.
| | 04:51 | As I do so, I want you to pay attention to the X,
Y, and Z fields over in the Bone Setup rollout.
| | 04:58 | Usually, scaling an object outside of a sub-
object selection can cause problems inside 3ds Max.
| | 05:06 | You will notice, as I use the Scale tool, all
CAT is doing is updating the bone's parameters,
| | 05:12 | which is very different
from typical 3ds Max behavior.
| | 05:16 | We can even add another bone onto a custom
bone by simply selecting it and then coming
| | 05:22 | over to the Command panel and
clicking the Add Bone button once again.
| | 05:27 | Let's just move and rotate
this new bone into position.
| | 05:31 | A nice feature of this Add Bone approach is
that if I grab our original bone and rotate it,
| | 05:37 | you can see the two bones are linked
together and ready for animation.
| | 05:43 | Although we have just added three bones to our
head, we are by no means limited to just these.
| | 05:49 | In fact, we can add as many extra bones as
we like and then shape and position them using
| | 05:54 | the tools we have shown.
| | 05:56 | This gives us creative freedom
to build any type of rig we need.
| | 06:01 |
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| Adding toes and tails| 00:00 | On occasion, we may need to
rig a character that has a tail.
| | 00:05 | As we have by now come to expect,
CAT makes this process very simple.
| | 00:10 | For this particular character,
we're going to create a tail.
| | 00:14 | First, though, we need to address the fact
that our character is clearly lacking the
| | 00:17 | ability to balance or even walk,
due to the absence of feet.
| | 00:22 | So, let's fix this problem.
| | 00:25 | As we select our hub--whether this is an ankle
or a hand bone--and come over to the Modify panel,
| | 00:32 | you will notice that below the controls for
adjusting the shape we have an option to set
| | 00:36 | the number of digits.
| | 00:39 | Let's just type 2 into this field and press Enter,
and straight away, the two digits added to our rig.
| | 00:46 | Now each digit comprises of two bones that
had all linked up and are ready to be manipulated.
| | 00:54 | I'm just going to come over to the Digits
Setup rollout and increase the number of bones
| | 00:58 | in our digit to 4, just
for demonstration purposes.
| | 01:02 | There are a number of handy features here that can
be extremely useful for both riggers and animators alike,
| | 01:09 | the first of which is the ability to
easily select an entire digit hierarchy.
| | 01:15 | To demonstrate, if we just double-click at
the top level in our chain--in this case, the
| | 01:20 | first link in the toe or maybe even a
finger--all the children are also selected.
| | 01:27 | This of course is standard 3ds Max behavior.
| | 01:30 | But it is really nice that it is being
carried over to CAT's Digit Controls.
| | 01:35 | Now, when we translate these bones with the
Move tool, they all move in unison, and there
| | 01:40 | is no stretching or compressing as there
would be if we move the individual links.
| | 01:46 | To look at the second handy feature,
let's reach over to our Rotate Total.
| | 01:50 | And again, double-clicking the first link in the
hierarchy, let's Rotate our digit around the Y axis.
| | 01:57 | As you can see, we get an offset rotation on all
the bones, enabling those to easily curve the toe.
| | 02:03 | However, if we select just one of the
bones and rotate, we get standard FK behavior.
| | 02:10 | Let's just quickly select our ankle, and I'm going
to set the number of digits to 1 and press Enter.
| | 02:17 | If you're wondering why we're using only
one digit, I'm just really simplifying the rig
| | 02:21 | a little and use on a single digit to
serve as the paw bone for our creature.
| | 02:27 | I'm just going to select
one of the bones in my digit.
| | 02:31 | I'm just going to scale
it up on the Y and Z axis.
| | 02:35 | And then make them a little
shorter by scaling down in the X.
| | 02:39 | Now, we can select our other ankle
bones and set the number of digits to 1.
| | 02:47 | And then coming back to our toes, we can use
the copy digits command and then just select
| | 02:53 | our other digits and paste the exact
same settings on to all of these bones.
| | 03:00 | With our feet now in place, let's switch over
to adding a tail to our character, which perhaps
| | 03:05 | is surprisingly has very
similar controls to the digits.
| | 03:09 | To create our tail, we'll just
switch over to our Tail Camera.
| | 03:14 | And once again, we'll select our pelvis hub
and come over to the Hub Setup rollout and
| | 03:19 | choose the add Tail option.
| | 03:22 | At first, our tail is pointing a
straight up and not in the correct orientation.
| | 03:27 | So, let's just press F3 and double-click the
first link in the hierarchy, and let's just
| | 03:33 | move this into place.
| | 03:36 | And then we'll switch over to our Rotate tool, and
again, selecting the first link in the hierarchy,
| | 03:41 | we'll just rotate this around the Z axis.
| | 03:46 | I also just want to lower
the amount of links in my tail.
| | 03:50 | So, let's come down to the Tail Setup rollout
and just change the number of links to 3.
| | 03:56 | While we're in the Modify panel,
let's also adjust the size.
| | 03:58 | So we will scroll up, and we'll set the X,
Y, and Z values to 5, 5, and 5 for our first
| | 04:06 | link and press Enter.
| | 04:08 | And then we'll set them to 4, 4, and 5, and then
for our final link we'll set them to 2.5, 2.5, and 5.
| | 04:20 | As with our digits, if we double-click the
first link in the hierarchy and use our Rotate
| | 04:25 | tool, we get the same curling effect, which will
enable us to position our tail a little easier.
| | 04:31 | On the surface, adding digits in tails seems
like the fairly obvious and straight forward
| | 04:37 | functionality that we
may think has limited uses.
| | 04:41 | But once you work with the controls for a
while, you begin to realize these same bone
| | 04:45 | chains could probably be used to control
cartoon hairs, antennas, tentacles, alien or creature
| | 04:52 | facial features, and maybe even a whole lot more.
| | 04:56 | At this point, to finish up, what we would
probably want to do is inspect our rig and
| | 05:01 | make sure that pivot placement
and bone sizes are correct.
| | 05:06 |
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|
|
4. Working with the Muscle SystemsWhat is a muscle strand?| 00:00 | Rigging organic characters, whether fantasy or
real, can be a challenge with most rigging tools.
| | 00:07 | The CAT object we are going to look
at in this video is the muscle strand.
| | 00:12 | It simulates the flexing motion of a
muscle, and with it we can add an extra layer of
| | 00:17 | believability to our rig.
| | 00:19 | To take a look at the muscle strand's
controls, we first need to create one in the scene.
| | 00:24 | So over in the Command panel, we
want to come to the Helper section,
| | 00:28 | drop down our list, and choose CAT Objects.
| | 00:32 | Once we have selected the Muscle Strand
option, it takes only four clicks of the mouse to
| | 00:36 | create one in our scene.
| | 00:39 | Our first click sets an
initial anchor point for the strand.
| | 00:44 | The next click creates a Bezier handle that
eventually will help control the shape of our muscle.
| | 00:50 | Then the process somewhat reverses in that
our next click creates another Bezier control
| | 00:56 | and then the final click
creates our second anchor point.
| | 01:00 | Now I'm just going to right-click
to end the creation process.
| | 01:04 | The anchor points are really for fixing
our muscle at a particular point in 3D space.
| | 01:11 | When we select an anchor point and then move
it around in our scene, you will notice that
| | 01:16 | as well as changing the position, we
also affect the shape of our muscle.
| | 01:22 | On the other hand, our Bezier handles, if I
just select and translate one of those in
| | 01:27 | our scene, I really just design to affect only
the shape of the muscle strand and they have
| | 01:32 | no effect on its position.
| | 01:35 | As with other CAT objects, once we have the
muscle strand selected, we can come over to
| | 01:40 | the Modify tab and see all
the options available to us.
| | 01:45 | One important option is the
type of muscle that we will use.
| | 01:50 | This will mostly depend on the pipeline
that we are using for our entire project.
| | 01:55 | For example, if we are going to be rigging,
animating, and then rendering all in 3DS Max,
| | 02:01 | then using the Mesh option will work just fine.
| | 02:05 | If, however, we are creating a rig that
needs to go into a game engine, we need to make
| | 02:10 | a distinction between mesh and bone
objects that a game engine can recognize.
| | 02:15 | In that instance, we would
need to use the Bones option.
| | 02:19 | This as you can see turns each muscle
section into individually selectable bones that the
| | 02:25 | game engine can then read.
I'm just going to set our type back to mesh.
| | 02:31 | Whilst our Bezier handles are extremely
useful for shaping our muscle strands, there may be
| | 02:37 | times when they are just getting in the way.
| | 02:41 | If this is the case, we have the option to
completely disable our handles all together.
| | 02:47 | Or if we would prefer, we then have this Handle Size
spinner that can just make them a little less intrusive.
| | 02:55 | Just below our Sphere Property section gives
us great control over the density and shape
| | 03:01 | of our muscle sections.
| | 03:03 | We have a spinner value, really
for setting whatever density we like.
| | 03:08 | Though we do again need to stress that the
simpler we can keep our rig, the better it
| | 03:12 | is for the animators.
| | 03:15 | Let's just set our number of spheres
to a value of 5 and then press Enter.
| | 03:21 | If we open up the Profile Curve dialog box,
we will see a Spline curve that represents
| | 03:27 | the shape of our muscle strand.
| | 03:30 | Let's add a few points to this curve
just to get an idea of how it works.
| | 03:34 | Open the Toolbar, we will click the Add Point
button, and then we'll going to click to the
| | 03:39 | left and to the right of our midpoint.
| | 03:42 | Next, we'll select our Move tool and then
come and select the midpoint, and I just want
| | 03:47 | you to keep an eye on the viewport as I
drag this point up and down on our curve.
| | 03:53 | As you will see this drastically
alters the shape of our Muscle strand.
| | 03:58 | As with most Splines in Max, we have the ability to
select the point, right-click, and change its tangent type.
| | 04:06 | I'll just choose Bezier
Smooth for demonstration purposes.
| | 04:10 | And as you can see, we now have
some Bezier handles that we can adjust.
| | 04:15 | If you are going to make edits to the curve,
just be warned that in some versions of Max,
| | 04:20 | the Reset Curves button may not work.
Let's just dismiss the dialog box.
| | 04:26 | I'm going back over to the Modify panel.
| | 04:29 | Next, we have the Squash and Stretch options that
control how our muscle strand deforms during motion.
| | 04:37 | To demonstrate how this works, let's add
a simple animation to one of our anchors.
| | 04:41 | I will turn Auto Key and then coming to my Track
bar, I'm just going to Slide it up to frame 20.
| | 04:50 | Then using the Move tool, I'll select one
of my anchor points, and I'm just going to
| | 04:55 | drag it in the negative X axis.
| | 04:59 | Then to move the point back to its original
position, I'm going to select the first keyframe
| | 05:04 | in my Track bar and holding down the Shift
key, I'm going to click and drag to make a
| | 05:08 | copy and place this on frame 40 by
releasing my mouse button and the Shift key.
| | 05:14 | It's probably best to turn off
Auto Key at this point as well.
| | 05:19 | Let's just scrub the Time slider and see how our
muscles strand reacts to the motion of the anchor.
| | 05:26 | Now, to compare, we'll come back to the bottom
of our Modify panel, and we're going to enable
| | 05:32 | the Squash and Stretch option.
| | 05:35 | Scrubbing the time slider again, we will
see that the deformation of our muscle strand
| | 05:40 | is considerably different.
| | 05:42 | The final controls in the muscle strand
give us the ability to adjust the start and end
| | 05:48 | position of each sphere in our strand,
| | 05:51 | giving us, of course, a little more
control over the final look of our muscle.
| | 05:57 | Clearly, the muscle strand itself has
quite a number of control options available.
| | 06:02 | When we add these to the many features
already available on our rig, we add an extra layer
| | 06:07 | of believability to our character's motion
and open up a whole new set of possibilities
| | 06:12 | that animators can work with.
| | 06:15 |
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| Using a muscle strand on a rig| 00:00 | Now that we have a basic understanding of
the muscle strand and its options, let's apply
| | 00:05 | what we have learned and attach a muscle
strand to the front leg of our character rig.
| | 00:11 | The first thing we need of
course is a muscle strand.
| | 00:14 | So, let's navigate to our CAT Object
section and select the Muscle Strand option.
| | 00:20 | Now, coming over to the Front viewport, I
can click four times to create both the anchor
| | 00:25 | points and the Bezier control handles for my
strand, and then right-click to end the creation process.
| | 00:32 | At the moment, our strand is just floating in
the air, so let's grab the right-most anchor
| | 00:38 | and coming up to the Max Toolbar, I'm just
going to select the Align option and then
| | 00:43 | click the upper leg bone of our rig.
| | 00:47 | We can use whichever alignment option
we need to properly place the muscle.
| | 00:52 | In this case, using the Pivot to
Pivot option works quite nicely.
| | 00:56 | So, I'm just going to press OK.
| | 00:59 | Grabbing the other anchor point, again, I'm
going to come up to my Align tool, but this
| | 01:03 | time I'm going to align to the ankle bone,
again, choosing Pivot to Pivot and clicking OK.
| | 01:10 | Obviously, this is not physically correct,
| | 01:14 | but because I want to demonstrate the effects
of the rig's motion on the muscle, this option
| | 01:19 | will work very nicely.
| | 01:22 | Before moving on, I'm just going to adjust
the strand shape ever so slightly by selecting
| | 01:27 | the Bezier control handle and just moving
it in and then grabbing the second handle
| | 01:31 | and moving it down as well.
| | 01:34 | At the moment, the muscle is simply aligned
with but not attached to our rig, which means
| | 01:41 | if I grab the foot platform, during
animation our muscle will simply get left behind.
| | 01:49 | This is not the desired behavior, so let's
use Max's Select and Link tool to actually
| | 01:54 | link each anchor point to the appropriate bone.
| | 01:59 | I'm just going to use my middle mouse wheel to zoom in,
in the Front viewport, and selecting our first anchor,
| | 02:06 | I'm going to click and hold down the left
mouse button and then drag and release the
| | 02:10 | mouse over our upper leg bone.
| | 02:13 | You'll notice the bone in box of that bone in
the Camera view flashes, and it just indicates
| | 02:17 | that we have linked our anchor to that bone.
| | 02:21 | Using my middle mouse button, I'm going to
pan down to my second anchor point and repeat
| | 02:25 | the process, but this time
selecting the ankle bone.
| | 02:30 | For a more realistic deformation,
let's just select our muscle strand.
| | 02:35 | Come over to the Modify tab and scrolling all the way
down, it's options, let's enable Squash and Stretch.
| | 02:42 | Now, if we grab the foot platform of our
rig and translate it, you will notice that the
| | 02:48 | muscle strand moves and deforms
exactly how we would want it to.
| | 02:53 | With the muscle placed on and linked to our
rig, we can make use of the available controls
| | 02:59 | to adjust the shape and fit the muscle
according to our character's particular needs.
| | 03:06 | As it is highly unlikely that a single
muscle strand will add greatly to the realism of
| | 03:10 | our creature's movement, it is good to
know that we can add as many muscle strands to
| | 03:16 | our creature as the current project, and to
some extent, our hardware resources will allow.
| | 03:23 |
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| What is a CAT muscle?| 00:00 | Much like the muscle strand, the CAT Muscle
allows us to simulate much more complex movement
| | 00:06 | in our rig than would typically be
possible with standard CAT Bones.
| | 00:11 | A CAT Muscle can really be thought of as a
virtual skin that can move, stretch, and be
| | 00:18 | influenced by other geometric objects in the
scene to create both depressions and bulges
| | 00:23 | in a character's skin.
| | 00:26 | Let's have a look at the controls of this
powerful tool set by coming over to our Helper section,
| | 00:32 | dropping our list down, and choosing CAT Objects.
| | 00:35 | After selecting the CAT Muscle option, we
can create this system in the same manner
| | 00:40 | we would as a standard plane primitive, that
is by simply clicking and dragging our left-
| | 00:46 | mouse button in our viewport.
| | 00:49 | I'm just going to right-click and select my
Move tool, and I'm just going to move this
| | 00:54 | muscle up in my Camera view
just so we can get a better view.
| | 00:59 | You will notice right away that we have a
number of Bezier handles in our viewport surrounding
| | 01:04 | the muscle that bear a striking resemblance
to the Anchors and Tangent handles that came
| | 01:09 | with our Muscle Strand object.
| | 01:12 | As you can probably guess, these are used
in the same manner to position and control
| | 01:17 | the shape of our bone.
| | 01:19 | Each corner point is an anchor that can be moved to
change both position and shape of our muscle, like so.
| | 01:27 | Each handle attached to these
corners controls how our muscle is shaped.
| | 01:34 | You may have also noticed as I move the anchors
and tangent handles around, that our CAT Muscle
| | 01:39 | is not the solid plane it
appears to be at first glance.
| | 01:44 | In fact, this object is actually made up of
a number of smaller planes, which is a fact
| | 01:49 | you will see the significance
of in a little while.
| | 01:53 | Let's come over to our Modify panel with
the CAT Muscle selected just to take a look at
| | 01:58 | the controls we have available.
| | 02:00 | As you can see, we have the same Mesh
and Bones option as with the muscle strand.
| | 02:06 | And naturally, the same principles
discussed in that video apply here as well.
| | 02:12 | We also have the ability to set the
density of this bone via its U and V spinners.
| | 02:19 | This in reality adds to or subtracts from the
number of segments or planes making up our CAT Muscle.
| | 02:27 | We would want to alter these according to
the deformation needs of our mesh, of course.
| | 02:32 | But keep in mind that an animator requires a responsive
rig, so only use a density that is genuinely required.
| | 02:40 | Scrolling to the bottom of our options, we also have
our extremely important Collision Detection controls.
| | 02:49 | As we want to focus very
specifically on these for a while,
| | 02:52 | in our next video, we are going to
demonstrate how our earlier muscle strand can actually
| | 02:57 | be used to interact with
and deform our CAT Muscle.
| | 03:01 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Putting a CAT muscle to work| 00:00 | To take a look at the collision detection
functionality available in a CAT Muscle,
| | 00:05 | our Start scene has a muscle strand set up
with some familiar animation applied to it.
| | 00:11 | We also, of course, have a CAT
Muscle set up and ready to work with.
| | 00:16 | If I scrub the Time slider, you can see
that we have animated one of the anchor points
| | 00:20 | on our strand, which is giving those a nice
bulge effect due to the Strand's Squashing
| | 00:24 | and Stretch option being enabled.
| | 00:27 | What we want to do is use the motion of the
strand to create a collision effect on our CAT Muscle.
| | 00:34 | Let's select our muscle and come over to the
Modify tab and just scroll down in the Limbs
| | 00:40 | rollout to our Collision Detection controls.
| | 00:43 | To add a Collision object, we need to click the Add
button and then select the desired object in the scene.
| | 00:50 | In this instance, of course, we
want to choose the muscle strand.
| | 00:54 | The Strand is added to the Collision List,
and if I scrub the Time slider, you can see
| | 00:59 | that we have some effects on our muscle.
| | 01:02 | Of course, we are not getting anything
tremendously usable at this moment in time.
| | 01:07 | Lacking the density needed, our muscle
simply cannot deform in an accurate manner.
| | 01:13 | To fix this with the muscle still selected,
let's come to the top of our rollout and adjust
| | 01:18 | the U and V Segments.
| | 01:21 | I will set both to a value
of 10 and then press Enter.
| | 01:26 | Of course, if you are using your own scene, you
will need to find a value that works for you.
| | 01:32 | If we scrub the Time slider again, you can
see our CAT Muscle now conforms much more
| | 01:37 | closely to the Collision object.
| | 01:41 | Don't be alarmed that its surface looks a
little segmented at this moment in time.
| | 01:46 | By default, the Muscle Type is set to Bones.
| | 01:50 | This means the CAT Muscle is made up of
separate Bone objects that can be skinned to a mesh
| | 01:56 | via the Skin Modifier.
| | 01:58 | In our case, we want to
switch this option over to Mesh.
| | 02:02 | We now get a clear view of how this
would look when deforming a mesh object.
| | 02:08 | As a side note, when using this Mesh option,
we would need to use a Skin Wrap rather than
| | 02:13 | the sounded Skin Modifier.
| | 02:16 | As well as using Collision objects to create bulges
in a mesh, we can also employ them to add depressions.
| | 02:22 | To demonstrate, we first need
to unhide our Collision object.
| | 02:26 | So, let's open up our 3ds Max Layer
Manager and make our Sphere layer visible.
| | 02:31 | Whilst I'm here, I will hide the muscle
strand as we finished working with it.
| | 02:37 | To use our Sphere, the first thing we need to do is
come to the Collision Detection controls yet again,
| | 02:43 | click the Add button, and
this time choose our Sphere.
| | 02:47 | It looks like we are getting some
strange behavior from our muscle.
| | 02:52 | This is because at the moment our muscle is
assuming the sphere has been pushed up and through it.
| | 02:58 | What we need to do is invert
the Collision object's behavior.
| | 03:02 | To do this, we will select the Sphere in our list,
and scrolling down, we will choose the Invert option.
| | 03:09 | If we select or move our sphere down, you can
see that our geometry is pushing our CAT Muscle
| | 03:14 | end and causing a depression.
| | 03:17 | The CAT Muscle can be extremely useful for
simulating forces or objects that affect
| | 03:22 | a character's skin, clothing or
indeed any paths of the mesh.
| | 03:27 | When combined with muscle strands and
attach to a rig, we add a level of believability
| | 03:32 | to an animated character's skin deformation that would
be both complex and time-consuming to set up manually.
| | 03:39 |
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|
5. Animation Layers ExplainedUnderstanding the Setup and Animation modes| 00:00 | We have already seen a number of times that
by default in CAT, whenever we move a bone
| | 00:05 | we get a change in bone length.
| | 00:08 | This behavior occurs because we are always placed
in Setup mode once we have created a CAT parent.
| | 00:15 | This mode exists so that we can set up our rig,
moving and editing bones to fit the mesh before
| | 00:21 | we start to animate.
| | 00:23 | Once we are ready to animate, we would then
need to switch the system over to Animation
| | 00:28 | mode where we are able to make use of CAT's IK/
FK functions and its powerful animation layers.
| | 00:36 | How do we access the Animation mode of CAT?
| | 00:39 | With the bone on our rig selected, we want
to come over to the Motion tab, which is where
| | 00:44 | all of CAT's animation controls reside.
| | 00:48 | We want to come to the Layer Manager
rollout and take a look at the big red button.
| | 00:54 | It is this that puts us in Animation mode.
| | 00:57 | In order to enter Animation mode, we will
need an Animation layer applied as we have here.
| | 01:03 | As we'll be covering Animation layers in
depth throughout this chapter, there is no need
| | 01:07 | to worry about how to add one just yet.
| | 01:10 | Once our mode Toggle is pressed, you will
notice it turns green, indicating that we are
| | 01:17 | ready to start animating.
| | 01:19 | This might take a bit of getting used to if
you are used to animating with Max as it uses
| | 01:24 | red to indicate that Auto Key mode is enabled.
| | 01:29 | Because of this, it is good practice to
always check this toggle's color before we begin
| | 01:34 | manipulating our CAT rig.
| | 01:37 | Turning Animation mode on will change how our rig
behaves in connection with bone translation in the scene.
| | 01:45 | Let's take a look at just how things change
by first of all making sure we have the Move
| | 01:49 | tool enabled by pressing the W key.
| | 01:52 | And then we'll going to select the wrist bone,
and if we translate it in our scene, what we
| | 01:58 | see is that we no longer change
the size of our bones as we drag.
| | 02:03 | Instead, CAT's IK systems are being
used to drive the motion of our arm.
| | 02:09 | Because of this, we are able to
easily pose our characters for animation.
| | 02:13 | However, we do need to be careful whenever
we are rotating rig bones, as there really
| | 02:20 | is no obvious difference in
behavior between Setup and Animation modes.
| | 02:25 | So, it is best practice to double check that
the mode Toggle is set to the desired state
| | 02:32 | before we work with our rig.
| | 02:35 | If we find we need to make some changes in
the setup of our rig, we can of course simply
| | 02:40 | click the Toggle button again to re-enter
Setup mode and then make any necessary adjustments.
| | 02:47 | In connection to both modes, if we come over
to the Hierarchy tab and then click the Link
| | 02:53 | Info button and come down to our Bone
Hierarchy rollout, you will see that we have quite a
| | 02:59 | number of options that can be used to alter how
different controls in both Setup and Animation Modes will behave.
| | 03:07 | Understanding the difference between CAT's
Animation and Setup modes is a key concept
| | 03:13 | that we will need to keep in
mind anytime we are working with CAT.
| | 03:17 |
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| Exploring the Absolute layer| 00:00 | Animation layers are the containers for all
animation keyframes we may place on our rigs.
| | 00:06 | They are very powerful versatile set of
controls that allow us to store, layer up, and even
| | 00:13 | blend multiple animations together.
| | 00:16 | The simple truth is that without an animation layer
applied in CAT, we have no way of creating animation.
| | 00:23 | Let's take a look at the first Animation layer type
that we will consider, which is the Absolute layer.
| | 00:30 | Selecting our rig and
going over to the Motion panel,
| | 00:33 | let's come down to the Layer Manager rollout.
| | 00:36 | And you can see we already
have an animation layer applied.
| | 00:40 | As we are already in Animation mode--denoted
by the Green Toggle button--we can come and
| | 00:46 | scrub the Time slider and see that we
already have some motion applied to our rig.
| | 00:53 | Animation layers are created by
coming to the Add Layer button,
| | 00:57 | clicking and holding down the left-mouse button,
and selecting the layer that we want to work with.
| | 01:03 | While we're here, let's apply an Absolute layer.
| | 01:06 | As you can see, now if we scrub the Timeline again, an
Absolute layer supersedes any previous layer's animation.
| | 01:15 | In other words, with two Animation layers in the stack,
only the second are top layer has any visible effect.
| | 01:23 | As we have no animation on this new layer,
nothing really is happening in the viewport.
| | 01:30 | Unlike Photoshop's layer stack, or even Max's
own Modifier Stock, CAT Animation layers
| | 01:36 | are not calculated from the
bottom of the list to the top,
| | 01:40 | but rather from the top down.
| | 01:42 | This means the second layer in our
list is now in reality the top layer.
| | 01:48 | Let's turn on Auto Key and add some
extra animation to our newly-created layer.
| | 01:53 | A simple rotation applied to
each arm bone should do nicely.
| | 01:57 | I will scrub the Time slider to around about frame
30 and then switch to my Rotate tool using E key.
| | 02:05 | And I'm just going to rotate the
upper arm bone of each limb, like so.
| | 02:10 | Once in position, I'm just going to come
down and make sure I turn off Auto Key.
| | 02:17 | Now of course, when we scrub our Time slider,
all we see is our newly-applied rotation motion.
| | 02:25 | It is important to note at this point that
we have not overwritten the animation that
| | 02:30 | was already applied to our rig. We have simply
layered another animation on top of it.
| | 02:36 | If we were to delete this layer or disable
it by simply coming back to our Layer Manager
| | 02:41 | and then double-clicking on our Absolute layer,
you will see that we get our previous animation back.
| | 02:49 | The Absolute layer type is the canvas
on which we paint our animation with CAT.
| | 02:54 | It is a basic Animation layer that has no
unique or special properties but that has
| | 02:59 | been designed to be the default
or standard Animation layer in CAT.
| | 03:04 | In our next video, we will consider two layer
types that do have some unique aspects to them.
| | 03:09 | These are the Relative Local and
Relative World Animation layers.
| | 03:13 |
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| Explaining adjustment layers| 00:00 | Relative Local and Relative World are
additive Adjustment layers for animation.
| | 00:06 | With them we can alter the pose or motion of
any animated character while still retaining
| | 00:12 | any animation or motion that
has already been applied.
| | 00:16 | There is, however, a significant difference
between Relative Local and Relative World
| | 00:20 | that we need to illustrate.
| | 00:22 | To do that, we have now a start scene, a base
human rig with a very simple rotation animation
| | 00:28 | applied to the left foot.
| | 00:30 | If we select our foot platform
and come up to the Motion tab--
| | 00:34 | I'm just going to right-click and
come down to the Layer Manager rollout--
| | 00:38 | as you can see, we're in Animation mode,
so let's apply a Relative Local layer.
| | 00:43 | As this is an Adjustment layer, we should be
able to move our character's foot while still
| | 00:49 | rotating our original animation.
| | 00:52 | Let's press the W key to enable our Move tool
and place our foot platform on top of the box.
| | 00:59 | As you can see, applying a Move Transform
works as expected. Our pose has been altered.
| | 01:05 | When we play the animation, however, we can see a
potential problem with how the Relative Local layer works.
| | 01:12 | It calculates the rotational pivot from the
layer on which the original animation was created.
| | 01:20 | This may be just what we want or need.
| | 01:23 | If, though, this is not the desired behavior,
we might instead want to look at using the
| | 01:28 | Relative World Adjustment layer.
| | 01:30 | To do this, let's first double-click
our Relative Local layer to disable it.
| | 01:35 | Now, we can click the Add layer button again,
and this time add a Relative World layer.
| | 01:41 | With our Move tool still active, let's
place our foot platform back on top of the box.
| | 01:46 | If we play the animation again, you can see
the rotation is now taking place around the
| | 01:52 | foot's current pivot point as determined by CAT's foot
pivot system and its current position in world space.
| | 02:00 | This of course gives us much more
predictable behavior from our rotations.
| | 02:05 | Which of these Adjustment layer types we use
in our animations will clearly depend upon
| | 02:10 | the type of rotation
transforms we need to apply.
| | 02:13 | Ultimately, though, both of these layer
types provide animators with extremely powerful
| | 02:18 | options for building,
altering, and shaping their animations.
| | 02:23 |
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| Exploring the CATMotion layer| 00:00 | The CAT Motion layer is use to apply
procedurally generated motion to a CAT rig.
| | 00:06 | This oftentimes is used to quickly test
out the skinning work done on a character as a
| | 00:11 | way of getting up and running quickly
with a character's walk or run cycle.
| | 00:16 | We can even use it for final animation once
we've edited it using the CAT's Motion editor.
| | 00:22 | Let's take a look at how we apply at how we
apply CAT Motion to our rig by selecting a
| | 00:26 | bone and coming up to the Motion tab.
| | 00:30 | Then we can right-click and
choose our Layer Manager rollout.
| | 00:34 | Once there, we will come down and click and
hold on our Add layer button, come all the
| | 00:38 | way down to the bottom and release
our mouse to add a CAT Motion layer.
| | 00:43 | By default this layer will add a
basic procedural walk to our CAT rig.
| | 00:48 | We can view this motion by enabling Animation mode
and then pressing play in 3ds Max's animation controls.
| | 00:55 | Here of course, we have applied the
motion to a standard bipedal character,
| | 01:00 | but we could just as easily have
used a horse, spider, or centipede rig,
| | 01:05 | and our CAT Motion layer could still be applied.
| | 01:09 | Directing our attention back to the
Animation layer stack, you'll notice that with a CAT
| | 01:14 | Motion layer we now get a new button that
gives us access to a our CAT Motion editor.
| | 01:21 | This gives us the ability to control and refine
the procedural motion we have added to our rig.
| | 01:27 | If I just double-click the two legs option
and then double-click a Procedural Motion,
| | 01:31 | we get a new dialog box.
| | 01:34 | This asks if we want to load our motion
into a new layer. I'll load it into an existing
| | 01:39 | layer or replace the
motion we already have applied.
| | 01:43 | I'm going to choose Load Into
New Layer and then click Load.
| | 01:48 | As you can see, we have another
entry in our current layer's list.
| | 01:53 | This stack works in the same layer as CAT's
Animation Layer Manager and is calculated from the top down.
| | 02:00 | As you can see, we can even use the
Weight tool to blend multiple motions together.
| | 02:06 | Being able to layer up multiple motions
gives us the ability to experiment with and create
| | 02:11 | unique motions within a single CAT Motion layer.
| | 02:15 | We can also, of course, in the Layer Manager
rollout, add Adjustment layers on top of our
| | 02:21 | CAT Motion to refine and to change it.
| | 02:24 | We can even stack all the CAT Motion Layers
and then weight them according to our needs.
| | 02:31 | Having a powerful Procedural Motion Generator
available to us, once again, opens up a number
| | 02:36 | of options and possibilities when working with CAT.
| | 02:39 | Of course, applying a CAT Motion
layer is only the start of proceedings.
| | 02:43 | This is why in Chapter 7 we will be
focusing exclusively on using the CAT Motion editor.
| | 02:47 |
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|
6. The Animation WorkflowWorking with the hand and foot hubs| 00:00 | Hands and feet are possibly the
most dexterous part of a character.
| | 00:05 | This means that it can be quite
difficult to animate and make believable.
| | 00:09 | Thankfully, CAT has a special Hand and Foot
Hub that gives us digit controls designed
| | 00:13 | specifically for this task.
| | 00:16 | Keep in mind as we work through this
chapter that the spinners and sliders inside CAT's
| | 00:20 | control options can all be keyframe animated
using either 3ds Max's Set key or Auto key modes.
| | 00:27 | With this in mind, let's take
a look at CAT's Digit Controls.
| | 00:32 | Selecting our Hand Hub, we will come over to
the Motion tab, and coming down to our Layer
| | 00:37 | Manager rollout, we'll just make
sure we are in Animation mode.
| | 00:41 | Let's right-click a blank area of our rollout
and then select Digit Manager from the list.
| | 00:47 | This rollout contains a number of controls
that can help us animate digits on a CAT rig.
| | 00:53 | The first section provides a
list of preset hand positions.
| | 00:58 | To work with these, we first of all need to
select the desired pose, and then we can use
| | 01:03 | the Weight spinner to progressively
apply the pose to our selected Hand Hub.
| | 01:08 | If preferred, we could just double-click the
pose to instantly apply it at 100%.
| | 01:15 | We can also create quick blends
between presets if we want to.
| | 01:19 | For example, if I select a preset and then
adjust its weights ever so slightly and then
| | 01:26 | select another preset and adjust its weight, you
can see the final result is a new combination pose.
| | 01:33 | After our modifications, any unique digit
pose we create can naturally be saved and then
| | 01:38 | reused using the Save Pose option.
| | 01:41 | We can even remove poses from the
list using the Delete Clip button.
| | 01:46 | A word of caution, removing a clip in this fashion
will delete it from your 3ds Max application data files.
| | 01:53 | And actually, we can tweak the poses or indeed any
pose we create using the Digit Modifier controls.
| | 02:02 | We can demonstrate this by selecting a pose in the
list, and then selecting a digit that we want to modify,
| | 02:10 | then using the controls, we can create
something that may work a little better for our needs.
| | 02:17 | These same controls can also be used to
create brand-new digit poses from scratch.
| | 02:23 | To get our digits back to their default
position, I'm going to right-click and come back to
| | 02:27 | our Layer Manager and delete
our Absolute Animation layer.
| | 02:32 | Then I'm going to apply a new Absolute
layer and come back into Animation mode.
| | 02:38 | Because this step is not generally one we
would want to take, we may want to save a
| | 02:43 | new default digit pose before we
begin to work with our controls.
| | 02:48 | To do this, let's again just right-click
and come back to our Digit Manager rollout, and
| | 02:54 | before we make any modifications,
let's click the Save Pose Icon.
| | 02:59 | Once the Save As box appears, we can use
the name Default and then just click Save.
| | 03:05 | You will now notice our newly saved
pose appears in our Preset Poses list.
| | 03:11 | Now I can use the Individual Digit Modifier
controls and create a new pose for myself.
| | 03:18 | Not only can we adjust single digits as I
have done, but we can select multiple entries
| | 03:23 | in the list, and as we adjust any of the spinners,
the modification is applied to all the selected digits.
| | 03:31 | Remember, these controls are not just for
the hand hub but are also available for any
| | 03:37 | ankle bones that our character may have.
| | 03:41 | Without a doubt, the fiddly nature of digits
on a rig can make them somewhat frustrating
| | 03:46 | and tedious to work with.
| | 03:48 | Having ready-to-use controls such as those
found in CAT's Digit Manager rollout can go
| | 03:53 | a long way towards making digit animation a little
less tedious, maybe even a more enjoyable experience.
| | 04:00 |
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| Exploring the foot pivot system| 00:00 | We have already mentioned that having the
ability to set the rotation point for a limb--
| | 00:05 | in other words its pivot point--is a
critical piece of animation functionality.
| | 00:10 | In this respect, feet
present a very unique challenge.
| | 00:15 | The foot of a bipedal character can quite
literally pivot from pretty much any part
| | 00:19 | of it's surface area.
| | 00:22 | This means if we are going to produce as
wide a range of motion as possible, we really need
| | 00:27 | the ability to place CAT's foot platform
pivots in any location we choose.
| | 00:32 | Happily, this is exactly what we
can do using CAT's foot pivot system.
| | 00:38 | To see how this works, we will need an Animation
layer applied to our rig, just as we currently do.
| | 00:44 | We will also need to have Animation
mode active and the foot platform selected.
| | 00:51 | Before we start to make any adjustments,
let's press the E key to enable our Rotate tool,
| | 00:56 | and then just come into the viewport.
| | 00:58 | And if we rotate our foot platform, we
want to just take note of how it is behaving.
| | 01:05 | The foot platform uses the foot pivot to
determine the point from which rotation will take place.
| | 01:11 | By default, as we've just demonstrated, we
will find the pivot point placed in the center
| | 01:16 | of the platform which isn't really a
tremendously useful location for bipedal motion.
| | 01:22 | For instance, when we are walking--or more
specifically--when we are planting our foot
| | 01:28 | during a step, a foot will make use of
two, sometimes three points of rotation.
| | 01:35 | The initial contact point is
the heel, or rear of the foot.
| | 01:39 | Then as the foot rolls forward, the rotation
point shifts to the ball of the foot, and finally,
| | 01:45 | some people find themselves
rolling up and off the toe joints.
| | 01:49 | For demonstration purposes, we will
look at placing the pivot at the toes.
| | 01:54 | But the steps we take can be used to
place the pivot in any location we need.
| | 02:00 | With the foot platform selected, we need
to come up to the top of the Motion panel.
| | 02:05 | If your Sub Object selection button is grayed
out as mine is, you may just need to reselect
| | 02:10 | the foot platform in order to refresh Max's UI.
| | 02:14 | Once we have done this, we can click and
enable the Sub Object selection button.
| | 02:19 | With it pressed, you will notice that the
dropdown list directly to the right tells us that we
| | 02:24 | are manipulating the Pivot Controls.
| | 02:27 | Let's come to our viewport and just
move the pivot to the front of our foot.
| | 02:32 | You can see the position of our foot
pivot as denoted by the blue point helper.
| | 02:38 | So I don't accidentally adjust the pivot's
position again, I'm just going to come up
| | 02:43 | and turn off Sub-Object selection.
| | 02:45 | Now, when we press the E key and rotate
the foot platform, you will notice it rotates
| | 02:52 | around the repositioned pivot point.
| | 02:55 | The brilliant thing here is that we can even
animate the pivot's position, so as to make
| | 03:00 | use of as many locations as necessary.
| | 03:04 | Generally speaking, you would probably want
to animate with step keyframes to avoid any
| | 03:08 | kind of interpolation between pivot positions.
| | 03:12 | Due to the complex motion required for a character's foot rig,
working with a fixed pivot point will generally be unacceptable.
| | 03:21 | This would severely limit the animator as
they will now have only a very limited range
| | 03:25 | of motions available to use.
| | 03:29 | The fact that CAT gives us the ability to
both change and animate the change of the
| | 03:34 | foot pivot places a more powerful and wide
ranging set of options at the animators disposal.
| | 03:41 |
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| Exploring the CAT display inside track view| 00:00 | One potential difficulty during the animation
process is the availability of too much visual information.
| | 00:08 | Because of this, any sort of filtering tool
that allows us to focus on the specific elements
| | 00:14 | or bones we are currently
animating will always be welcome.
| | 00:18 | For instance, when refining animation, we may find ourselves
spending a lot of time inside 3ds Max's Track view.
| | 00:26 | To filter the amount of information displayed here, we
might want to make use of CAT's Track Display options.
| | 00:34 | You can access the Track Display Settings
by selecting a CATParent in the scene and
| | 00:38 | then coming over to the Modify panel.
| | 00:42 | Inside the CATRig Parameters rollout, you
will see we have a number of options that help
| | 00:46 | us simplify the animation data
being displayed inside Track view.
| | 00:52 | It is also good to note that these filters
will affect the keyframes displayed on the
| | 00:56 | timeline at the bottom of the Max UI.
| | 01:00 | If we jump over to the Motion tab, you can
see we have two animation layers applied to
| | 01:05 | our rig, each with a different motion.
| | 01:09 | We just need you to take note that our
currently active or selected layer is named CAT walk.
| | 01:16 | But it is the CAT Run layer that is
contributing 100% of the motion on our rig.
| | 01:23 | Back in the Modify tab, you will notice that by
default our Track Display option is active layer.
| | 01:31 | Let's select our thigh bone and
take a look in the Track view.
| | 01:35 | We need to dig down a little until we see the
LayerTrans section which has our two animation layers listed.
| | 01:42 | As our Track Display options are set to active
layer, the only CAT elements we can work with
| | 01:49 | are the editable tracks and keyframes
for the CAT walk layer.
| | 01:53 | Remember, this is the active animation layer.
| | 01:57 | If we look at our CAT Run track, because
this is not the active layer, we are not able to
| | 02:02 | view or edit any of its parameters.
| | 02:06 | Obviously, if we have multiple layers of
animation applied to a rig and only need to focus on
| | 02:11 | a single layer, the active
layer option can be very helpful.
| | 02:16 | However, the problem here is that we are only
able to access under the keys on a layer that
| | 02:22 | isn't currently contributing
anything to the motion on our rig.
| | 02:26 | Remember, this is all
coming from the CAT Run layer.
| | 02:31 | To get past this, let's once again select our
CATParent and in the Modify panel, let's switch
| | 02:37 | over to viewing only the Contributing Layers.
| | 02:41 | With this enabled, we are now seeing only
the layers that are currently contributing to
| | 02:45 | the animation of the
selected bone or bones in the rig.
| | 02:50 | If we again select our thigh, every parameter we
can now edit is relevant to the motion of this bone.
| | 02:58 | This of course means we won't waste time
editing parameters that are not relevant.
| | 03:04 | Finally, let's reselect our
CATParent and choose the All Layers option.
| | 03:10 | If we reselect our bone, you can see that
we get quite a jump in the amount of data
| | 03:15 | displayed and accessible in the dope sheet.
| | 03:19 | In fact, looking down at our Timeline we also see a
big increase in the amount of keyframes displayed here.
| | 03:27 | This is because this option--as you would
expect--displays every layer of animation applied
| | 03:32 | to our rig, whether it is contributing
to the current bone's motion or not.
| | 03:38 | Although not really filtering anything for us
as such, the All Layers option can sometimes
| | 03:43 | be useful if we just need a
global view of our animation setup.
| | 03:49 | Being able to either filter out or focus on
specific and editable animation data in either
| | 03:55 | the dope sheet or curve edited versions of
track view can go a long way to what's helping
| | 04:00 | to speed up the animation
editing and refinement process.
| | 04:05 |
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| Using the IK/FK system| 00:00 | In our start scene, we have a character that has
some basic translation keyframes applied to the pelvis.
| | 00:08 | The obvious problem we have created here is that
the hands of our rig pass through the table object.
| | 00:14 | This is a typical animation problem that we can fix
using the tools found in the CAT Limb Animation rollout.
| | 00:22 | Let's select the bone in our
limb and come up to the Motion tab.
| | 00:27 | By default, the arm in CAT has no IK Target,
so the first thing we need to do is use the
| | 00:34 | Create IKTarget button to get one.
| | 00:37 | Once we click this, we create a
special point helper in the scene.
| | 00:42 | Depending on your rig setup, you may or may
not initially see where this is being created.
| | 00:48 | This is not a problem as we can
now use the Select IK target button.
| | 00:53 | This--as its name suggests--selects the IK
target for the selected palm or ankle bone.
| | 01:00 | If I press W to select the Move tool, you can
see clearly where our target has been created.
| | 01:07 | With the IK target selected, you will notice the
name of this button switches to Select Limb End.
| | 01:14 | Pressing this button again selects the hub
that the IK target is linked to. In our case,
| | 01:19 | this is the palm bone.
| | 01:22 | Just as a side note here, the IK
target for a leg is the foot platform.
| | 01:27 | This of course is automatically created when we
create a preset rig or add a leg to a CAT hub.
| | 01:34 | I'm just going to come back and reselect my
palm bone, because the next operation we want
| | 01:39 | to perform is moving the IK target to our palm.
We also have a button that will do just that.
| | 01:47 | Now it is genuinely a good idea to use this
command before we begin working with the IK system.
| | 01:54 | Now we can use the IK/FK
slider to fix our hand problem.
| | 02:00 | This slider blends between inverse and forward
kinematic systems that can be used to animate limbs in CAT.
| | 02:07 | Zero means we are using full IK,
whilst the value of 1 uses full FK.
| | 02:13 | To show how this works, let's come to frame 20.
| | 02:17 | You can see the IK target is left behind,
sitting at the position we need for our hand.
| | 02:23 | So, let's slide the IK/FK value to zero, and
you will see our hand moves to the IK target
| | 02:30 | and is now planted on
the table as we would want.
| | 02:33 | Let's just scrub the Time
slider to see this in action.
| | 02:38 | When we are working in full IK mode, if we put
a check in the Display FK Limb in IK option,
| | 02:45 | in the viewport if I just scrub the Time slider to
refresh, we get a ghost or Y-Frame representation
| | 02:52 | of the FK position of our limb.
| | 02:55 | This is a great way to quickly see where
the limb would blend to once we start to move
| | 03:00 | the slider away from a value of zero.
| | 03:03 | You may want to explore using the
retargeting slider at this point.
| | 03:09 | This can give us some subtle differences regarding
the motion we will get from our rig when IK is enabled.
| | 03:16 | With the slider set to zero, retargeting is off
and a value of 1 means retargeting is fully on.
| | 03:23 | To see how this affects our current
animation, let's scrub the Time slider and just keep
| | 03:27 | an eye on our top viewport.
| | 03:30 | We will see that by default the solve that
we get from the IK system causes the limb
| | 03:35 | to bend at the elbow.
| | 03:38 | At this moment in time, the IK
chain ends at the top of the arm.
| | 03:43 | This means the position of the
hub or ribcage is not altered.
| | 03:48 | If we set retargeting to a value of 1 and
scrub our Time slider, we now see that the
| | 03:54 | IK solution is trying to maintain the basic
shape of our arm by allowing the associated
| | 04:00 | ribcage to be dynamically repositioned.
| | 04:04 | There is no doubt at all that CAT's ability
to switch or blend between IK/FK systems on
| | 04:09 | the same limb offers animators creative options and flexibility
regarding the types of motions that they can create.
| | 04:20 |
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|
|
7. Working with MotionExploring the CATMotion Editor| 00:00 | We have already had a brief introduction to
the CAT Motion editor in our Layers chapter.
| | 00:06 | Now though, it is time to go back and take a
more in depth look at the controls available
| | 00:11 | and how we can use them.
| | 00:13 | Over the course of this chapter, we will use
the CME or CAT Motion editor to edit and refine
| | 00:19 | a CAT Motion that we will
apply to our quadruped rig.
| | 00:23 | First, though, we want to spend some time in this
video familiarizing ourselves with the CME's interface.
| | 00:31 | Firstly, we need to select a bone on our rig
so that we can come up to the Motion tab and
| | 00:36 | come down to the Layer Manager rollout.
| | 00:40 | As you can see, we have already applied a
CATMotion layer to our rig, so we just need
| | 00:44 | to come down and click the CATMotion editor button,
and as you can see, this opens the editor window.
| | 00:52 | On the left-hand side of the window, we have a
list with entries for every editable aspect
| | 00:56 | of the motion applied to our CAT rig.
| | 01:00 | The first three options, CATMotion Presets,
Globals, and LimbPhases are generic and can
| | 01:06 | be found in the CATMotion editor, no matter what
rig or rig type we are currently working with.
| | 01:12 | On the right-hand side we find controls
and editable parameters for whatever entry we
| | 01:17 | have selected in the list.
| | 01:20 | If we come down and take a look at our pelvis,
as an example, you can see we now have access
| | 01:26 | to a series of controllers or options, each
of which handles a particular aspect of motion
| | 01:33 | for the limbs attached to this particular hub.
| | 01:36 | Each option has its own spline control with a
number of parameters that we can edit and adjust.
| | 01:44 | We also have a number of button functions
such as the ability to Toggle Independent
| | 01:49 | Leg Settings, Copy and Paste,
Reset our Spline, and also Zoom Extents.
| | 01:55 | Obviously, we will be able to observe how these work
as we refine our CAT Motion over the next few videos.
| | 02:03 | The sheer scale of parameters that we can
combine and manipulate in the CME means we
| | 02:09 | can easily explore a wide range of possibilities so as to
create a unique piece of procedurally-generated animation.
| | 02:17 | As we are now at least a little familiar
with the layout of the CME, let's set about using
| | 02:23 | these controls to start adding a little
bit of character to our existing CAT Motion.
| | 02:28 |
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| Customizing motion| 00:00 | The procedural motion CAT applies to our rig
will never be tailored to our character and
| | 00:05 | will most likely need some
adjustment before we are happy with it.
| | 00:09 | It is good to know then that every aspect of
our character's motion is completely editable.
| | 00:15 | If we select a bone in our character's rig
and come to the Motion tab, you will notice
| | 00:19 | that we are already in Animation mode.
| | 00:23 | So, let's press Play on our standard 3ds Max
animation controls and examine our motion.
| | 00:30 | We are looking for aspects of the motion
that we may be unhappy with or that we feel need
| | 00:34 | a little more character or personality adding.
| | 00:38 | Hopefully you will agree that there appears
to be a few problems with the motion on the
| | 00:42 | four limbs of our creature.
| | 00:44 | This is where we will focus
our efforts in this video.
| | 00:49 | One nice feature we could take advantage of
would be the fact that we can leave our animation
| | 00:53 | playing as we edit inside the CATMotion editor.
| | 00:57 | However, as this can potentially be very distracting
for viewers trying to focus on training, I'm
| | 01:02 | going to stop playback and
make my edits at frame zero.
| | 01:07 | Having examined our character's motion, we have
noted that our front limbs need a bit of work.
| | 01:13 | Really, our rib cage is sitting a little high,
and this is causing the front legs to pull
| | 01:17 | away from the ground, causing them
to look a little stiff and awkward.
| | 01:22 | To fix this, let's delve down into our RibCage_
Group and select the OffsetPosition controller.
| | 01:28 | I'm going to set the X value to -3,
but if I just drag down on the spinner,
| | 01:34 | around about to -15, you can see
that we could drastically alter the look of
| | 01:39 | our motion if we wanted to.
| | 01:42 | As stated, though, I'm just
going to set this to -3.
| | 01:46 | If we press Play once more, we can see how
this change has altered our character's motion.
| | 01:51 | I'm just going to stop the
playback and go to frame zero.
| | 01:56 | I would also like to slow our walk down just
a touch as the pace seems a little hurried.
| | 02:02 | To do this, I'm going to come up to the Globals section
in my list, and firstly, I want to adjust the Max Step Time.
| | 02:11 | So, let's highlight this value, and I'm
going to set it to 50 and press Enter.
| | 02:16 | This increases the amount of time it
takes our character to complete a step.
| | 02:22 | Then I want to bring my
Stride Length down a little.
| | 02:25 | As it seems our limb is having to stretch
quite a bit to reach its target at this moment
| | 02:30 | in time, so let's set this
value to 120 and again press Enter.
| | 02:36 | If we press Play, you can see we have slowed
down our character's motion, and also our rig
| | 02:40 | isn't having to stretch its limbs quite as far.
| | 02:44 | Another adjustment I want to make is to
get our creature's foot to have a little more
| | 02:48 | pitch or roll up as it takes each step.
| | 02:53 | Inside our RibCage_Group, let's expand the Legs
section and then scroll down to our FootPlatform
| | 02:59 | group and expand it also.
| | 03:02 | Here, I can select the Pitch option
and adjust its Scale to 240.
| | 03:09 | One thing you will note here is
that our Scale value has reset to 100.
| | 03:14 | Now this doesn't affect the edits made to
the curve. They remain in place, but obviously
| | 03:19 | this could be a little
confusing to us on first use.
| | 03:24 | If we want to reset the curve, putting it back to
its default state, we could use the Reset button.
| | 03:31 | Let's just copy these Pitch settings, and
then scrolling up, let's close our RibCage_Group
| | 03:37 | and expand our Pelvis group.
| | 03:39 | We'll expand Legs and then FootPlatform and
scroll down to the Pitch controller on our hind legs.
| | 03:47 | With this Pitch controller selected,
we can paste our settings.
| | 03:51 | Now we can be assured that the paws or feet of
our creature will all behave in the same manner.
| | 03:58 | If you just keep an eye on the paws of our
creature as I scrub the Time slider, you will
| | 04:02 | notice that now we have a
little bit more rotation.
| | 04:06 | We have only altered a few of our CATMotion
parameters, we could of course spend quite
| | 04:11 | a bit of time tweaking and altering our motion.
| | 04:15 | We may--once we have edited the CATMotion into a
form we are satisfied with--want to save it to disk.
| | 04:21 | To do this, we would scroll to the top of our
list and come into the CATMotion Presets and
| | 04:26 | choose the Save CATMotion Preset button.
| | 04:29 | We may be skeptical about a procedure
motion generator's ability to give us a level of
| | 04:34 | quality in our motion that
we could be satisfied with,
| | 04:38 | but given the fact that we can adjust every
aspect of the motion generated by CAT, it
| | 04:43 | isn't hard to see how we can edit it
into something that may be extremely usable.
| | 04:50 |
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| Directing motion| 00:00 | Using CATMotion, we have quickly and
easily added animation to our creature rig.
| | 00:06 | At this moment in time, however, our
character is simply walking on the spot.
| | 00:11 | In some pipelines, this
may be the desired end result.
| | 00:15 | In many situations, however, we may need to
have our character's motion cover ground as
| | 00:20 | it were and carry it through the environment.
With CAT we can quickly create this behavior.
| | 00:27 | First, we need to select a bone on
our rig and open the CATMotion editor.
| | 00:31 | Now I'm just going to move this off to one
side so I can see the rig in my viewport.
| | 00:37 | And then we want to make sure
we're in the Globals section.
| | 00:41 | In here, we can come to the Walk mode
section and click the Walk On Line option.
| | 00:48 | Now if we come down to our controls and press Play,
our CAT rig starts to travel through the scene.
| | 00:55 | Because we are working here with procedurally-
generated motion, and because the system has a Stride
| | 01:00 | Length option associated with it, you will
notice we have no issue with any of our feet sliding.
| | 01:07 | Although this is a step forward as it were,
we will at times need something much more
| | 01:13 | than to have our character
travel in straight lines.
| | 01:16 | In fact, we may need the ability to actually direct
the motion of our character at least to some extent.
| | 01:24 | To do this, we are going to
make use of our pre-made spline.
| | 01:28 | The first thing we need is a controllable node,
something we can use standard Max animation tools with.
| | 01:35 | In this instance, we will
create a Standard Max Point helper.
| | 01:39 | So to do this, let's come into our Creator and
into our Helper section and then click Point.
| | 01:45 | We will then click somewhere near our
spline in the viewport to create the Helper, but
| | 01:51 | its location is not that
important, as we will change it later.
| | 01:56 | Coming back to the Globals settings, you
will notice that we have the ability to bind
| | 02:01 | our rig to a Path Node.
| | 02:03 | In this instance, we will use the
Point helper we have just created.
| | 02:07 | Let's click the Path Node
button and then click our Helper.
| | 02:11 | Then our rig immediately snaps
to our Point helper's position.
| | 02:15 | We will obviously need to make sure we have
it selected and rotate the Helper so as to
| | 02:19 | orient our rig correctly.
| | 02:21 | I'm going to press E to enable my
Rotate tool and then A to turn on Angle Snap.
| | 02:26 | I'm just going to rotate this -90 degrees and
then another 90 to get it to face the correct way.
| | 02:34 | As any transforms applied to the Point
helper will now affect our rig, we can bind it to
| | 02:39 | our spline and animate it along the
path, taking our rig along for the ride.
| | 02:45 | Before doing this, however, we will want to
make certain that our time configuration settings
| | 02:50 | are sufficient for our needs.
| | 02:52 | If we have to alter these after setting up
the path animation, we will need to alter
| | 02:57 | not only 3ds Max's settings, but also
the CAT-specific ones found in the CMA.
| | 03:04 | To continue, then, with the Point helper
still selected, we can come up to our Animation
| | 03:09 | menu and choose Constraints > Path Constraint and then
click to select the spline to constrain our helper to it.
| | 03:18 | Playing back our motion, we
will see a very obvious problem.
| | 03:22 | Our Point helper is merely moving along the
spline and not turning with or following the curves.
| | 03:28 | Let's just stop the
playback and rewind to frame zero.
| | 03:33 | To change that behavior, we are going to
make sure our Point helper is still selected,
| | 03:37 | and in the Motion panel, we're just going
to close up a couple of the rollouts until
| | 03:41 | we come to the Path Parameters rollout, and we want
to come down and put a check in the Follow option.
| | 03:49 | You will instantly see the CATMotion footsteps
change direction and follow the curves of the path.
| | 03:55 | But as you can see, our
character is now walking backwards.
| | 03:59 | Now you may or may not run into this problem,
depending on the order of steps taken to attach
| | 04:04 | the rig to the Point helper and
then the Point helper to the spline,
| | 04:08 | but I have deliberately created this situation
so we can look quickly at how to fix it, should
| | 04:13 | we run into the problem.
| | 04:15 | We simply need to scroll down a little and
choose the Flip option in the Axis controls
| | 04:20 | to get our rig facing the correct way.
| | 04:24 | If I just press Play again, though, as our
rig travels along the spline, you will notice,
| | 04:29 | as it goes around the curves, that it
is trying to keep its initial shape.
| | 04:34 | This gives the appearance that our rig is sliding
around the curves as it is trying to remain rigid.
| | 04:41 | To make our rig bend to fit the curves on
our spline, in the CATMotion editor, making
| | 04:46 | sure we're in the Globals section, we're
just going to lower the Preserve Character Shape
| | 04:52 | value down to zero.
Let's just press Play one last time.
| | 04:57 | As you can see, our character now
turns into our bends with the curves.
| | 05:04 | Although there may be times when creating on-the-spot
animation is what we want to accomplish, we
| | 05:09 | will, at other times, want our
character to travel through a scene.
| | 05:13 | Now as you can see, by just using a few simple
options made available in the CATMotion editor
| | 05:18 | and some basic 3ds Max animation functionality,
we can accomplish this in no time at all.
| | 05:25 |
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| Grounding motion| 00:00 | At this point, we have made great strides in
getting our character moving through the environment.
| | 00:07 | What we have at this moment in time only allows for
our character to walk on a completely even surface.
| | 00:14 | What if our character needed to navigate
something like the steps in our start scene?
| | 00:19 | We could try adjusting points on our spline,
moving them around to match the uneven surface.
| | 00:26 | I'm just going to press Ctrl+Z to undo that
operation--or because we can actually manipulate
| | 00:32 | the footprints in the scene, we could go and place
each one by hand, aligning them with the stair geometry.
| | 00:40 | I'm just going to right-
click to cancel the operation.
| | 00:44 | Both methods would be rather time-consuming.
| | 00:47 | CAT, however, gives us a much simpler
method for grounding our character's motion.
| | 00:52 | Let's once again select a bone in our
rig and open up the CATMotion editor.
| | 00:58 | This time, rather than working in the
Globals section, we want to come into LimbPhases.
| | 01:04 | Here, we can tell CAT that we want our FootPrints
to follow a selected piece of geometry in the scene.
| | 01:12 | To do this, we'll come over and click the
Pick Ground button and then pick the geometry
| | 01:16 | that we want our FootPrints to align to.
In our case, we've selected the stair geometry.
| | 01:23 | If we just dismiss the dialog and scrub
our Time slider, our rig now travels through
| | 01:30 | the scene in a more convincing manner,
although maybe one or two footprints could do with
| | 01:35 | being placed in better positions.
| | 01:37 | For instance, if we just scrub to around
about frame 48, you will notice that we have
| | 01:44 | some problems with limbs
passing through our stair geometry.
| | 01:49 | I'm just going to go back a couple of
frames, so I can better select our footprints.
| | 01:56 | Now using the Move tool, I'm
going to alter their position.
| | 02:01 | If we scrub our Time slider now, you can
see our CATMotion has updated to follow the
| | 02:05 | new position of the footprint objects.
| | 02:08 | Obviously, the end result is not perfect,
but the speed with which we have reached this
| | 02:14 | point means we can now spend our time fine
tuning the position of the footprints in the scene.
| | 02:20 | We can, of course--coming back to our CATMotion editor--
still use any of the controls to adjust our motion.
| | 02:28 | Although one important note to remember is
any changes made in the CATMotion Presets,
| | 02:33 | Globals, or LimbPhases sections, will
require us to re-pick our ground, so as to update
| | 02:39 | the footprints in our scene.
| | 02:42 | We may even want to add additional CAT animation layers
to help augment the motion or make it more believable.
| | 02:50 |
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|
|
8. Putting It All TogetherBuilding a rig: The lower body| 00:00 | As we have spent quite a bit of time, up to
this point, looking at the multitude of tools
| | 00:05 | and options available in CAT, we thought it
would be useful to conclude with the chapter
| | 00:09 | that walks us through the process of
applying much of what we have learned.
| | 00:13 | We will make a start by building a custom
rig for our concept mesh, and then in subsequent
| | 00:18 | videos we will add secondary bones to help
with animation and skinning, add a quick skinning
| | 00:23 | pass, and then finally create a motion stress test
to see how the rig and skinning are working together.
| | 00:28 | To get started, we will first of all need
to create a CATParent at the world origin.
| | 00:35 | Coming to our Helper section, we will drop
down the list and choose CAT Objects and then
| | 00:41 | click the CATParent option.
| | 00:44 | Let's click and drag in our viewport, and
then I will right-click to end the creation
| | 00:49 | process and press the W key
to enable the Move tool.
| | 00:54 | I then will right-click our spinners
to place the Helper at world origin.
| | 00:58 | This is not an essential step, but for me,
working at the world origin has become what
| | 01:03 | I consider to be a good habit for a number
of reasons, not least of which is the fact
| | 01:08 | that 3ds Max's distance and size calculations are
much more accurate when you are close to the origin.
| | 01:15 | Next, coming into the Modified tab, we want to
make certain that we stay organized as we work.
| | 01:21 | So I'm just going to rename the CATParent once
again to OurRig with an underscore at the end.
| | 01:28 | Scrolling to the bottom of the
rollout, we will add a pelvis.
| | 01:32 | Obviously, we want to name it accordingly, so I
will select the hub and then rename this to Pelvis_.
| | 01:39 | While we are here, we
might as well alter its color.
| | 01:45 | Clicking the Color Swatch, I'm going to edit the
RGB values to 198, 225, and 87 and then click OK.
| | 01:55 | Just to make the positioning process easier,
I'm going to switch over the reference coordinate
| | 01:59 | system to Local and then do the same for
the Rotate tool and finally the Scale tool.
| | 02:07 | It is probably a good idea to adjust the
size of the pelvis also, as the skin modifier we
| | 02:13 | will later add creates these envelopes--or areas of
influence--based on the size of the initial bone.
| | 02:20 | Although our character's anatomy isn't entirely
realistic, I still want to adhere to the basic
| | 02:25 | structure of a humanized skeleton.
| | 02:27 | So I will adjust the rotation slightly to
better fit our mesh and finally move the hub
| | 02:33 | to sit in the pelvis area
and finish adjusting its size.
| | 02:39 | Panning down to our character's legs in the
viewport, we will then come over to the Modify
| | 02:43 | panel and click the Add Leg button.
| | 02:48 | Let's select our Ankle bone and adjust its
Length parameter, and also we will adjust
| | 02:54 | the placement of its pivot.
| | 02:57 | Depending on how you want your ankle
rotations to work, you may want to position your pivot
| | 03:00 | in a different location.
| | 03:03 | Of course, we want to alter the scale of
this bone to better fill our character mesh.
| | 03:08 | So coming over to the Modify panel, I will
first of all adjust the Height spinner and
| | 03:13 | then adjust the Width spinner until I am
happy with the scale of our Ankle bone.
| | 03:18 | Once in position, let's set the Number of
Digits to 1 and again adjust each bone to
| | 03:24 | match our character mesh.
| | 03:26 | I'm going to move them up
slightly and then scale them down.
| | 03:32 | As our character is wearing some farmer footwear,
anything more than one digit would add unnecessary complexity.
| | 03:38 | Again, thinking about where we want our joints to
rotate from, let's adjust our knee's pivot point.
| | 03:45 | Now we could place this at the front or
the back of the knee depending on the kind of
| | 03:49 | rotation we want from our Limb.
| | 03:51 | For our Leg, making adjustments
in the front view can be crucial.
| | 03:56 | This is because the limb may not drop
in a straight line down to the floor.
| | 04:00 | For this reason, let's adjust our leg bones
in a little, starting with the thigh, then
| | 04:07 | the knee, and finally our ankle bone.
| | 04:11 | Before moving on, we will want to adjust the size of
our thigh bone so as to fill the volume of the mesh.
| | 04:18 | Scrolling down to the Bone Setup rollout, I
will increase the Width and Depth parameters.
| | 04:24 | In the left on Perspective views, you can see
that I have kept my leg bent slightly at the knee.
| | 04:29 | Now this is oftentimes
referred to as the preferred angle.
| | 04:33 | This just helps the application understand how the joint
should solve when moving it using the IK system.
| | 04:41 | Let's just rename the Limb, adding an
underscore at the end, making it easy to find if we need
| | 04:46 | to search for it in the scene.
| | 04:49 | Once we are happy with everything, we can
select the pelvis hub once again and click
| | 04:53 | the Add Leg button to create the same
setup on the opposite side of the pelvis.
| | 04:59 | Let's stay organized by
altering the colors of our limbs.
| | 05:03 | I'm going to select the left leg and change
this to Biped Blue, of course using the same
| | 05:10 | values of 28, 28, and 177, and then select
the right leg and change it to Biped Green.
| | 05:19 | After clicking the Color Swatch, we will set
the values to 6, 133, and 6 and then click OK.
| | 05:27 | Panning up in our views, it's time to give
this character a spine using the Add Spine button.
| | 05:34 | Selecting the pelvis, we will come over
to the Modify panel and click Add Spine.
| | 05:39 | Let's select the Hub, and then in the Modify panel change
its name to RibCage with an underscore placed at the end.
| | 05:47 | We will then select the Color Swatch and set
the RGB values to 8, 110, and 133, and click OK.
| | 05:55 | I want to make sure the spine links are set
to 5 by selecting a bone in the Spine hierarchy
| | 06:01 | and then scrolling down to the Spine
Setup rollout and double checking the value.
| | 06:07 | Now I will position the hub using the Move tool.
| | 06:10 | Let's just bring it down to line up with
our character's chest and also rotate it ever
| | 06:16 | so slightly and then move it back into place.
| | 06:21 | And then, finally, switching over to the Scale
tool, let's adjust the size of our rib cage.
| | 06:27 | We want to make sure we are fitting it to
our character in both the Left and Front views.
| | 06:33 | Coming into the Front view, I want to
press F3 on my keyboard to switch to Wireframe.
| | 06:38 | And I'm just going to drag a marquee
selection around my spine bones, and holding the Alt
| | 06:44 | key I will remove the rib cage and pelvis
hubs from the selection and then scale all
| | 06:50 | the spine bones out to fill the mesh.
| | 06:53 | This is not an absolutely necessary step,
but for this character it will just help with
| | 06:58 | the skinning solution we
will apply later in this chapter.
| | 07:03 |
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| Building a rig: The upper body| 00:00 | Continuing with the rig-building exercise
begun in the previous video, the first thing
| | 00:05 | we need to do with our RibCage hub selected is come
into the Modify tab and then click the Add Arm button.
| | 00:12 | Obviously, we need a better view, so let's
click on our viewport label and switch this
| | 00:17 | Left view over to a Right view.
Now we can clearly see our rig's arm.
| | 00:24 | Switching to the Move tool via the W key,
we will position the wrist bone and align
| | 00:29 | it with the hand of our mesh.
| | 00:32 | To help rotate the arm into place, I'm going
to place the E key to switch over to the Rotate
| | 00:37 | tool, and then I'm going to change the
reference coordinate system over to Local.
| | 00:43 | In the Front viewport, we just want to make
sure our rig's arm has the same orientation
| | 00:48 | as the mesh version.
| | 00:50 | Then double-clicking the roots in the chain,
I will move the entire limb into place and
| | 00:56 | then adjust the collarbone's position.
| | 00:58 | Coming to the Front view, I'm just going
to tweak the position of the pivots for each
| | 01:03 | of the bones, first the pivot for the
elbow, and then the pivot for the wrist.
| | 01:11 | Our palm bone is facing the wrong way, so
using the Rotate tool, I'm going to adjust
| | 01:16 | the hub's orientation a little, again,
keeping an eye on the mesh in our viewport.
| | 01:24 | Working in only a single view will not give
us a complete picture of how the bones are
| | 01:29 | being placed in relation to the mesh.
| | 01:31 | So, I need to come over to the Right viewport and make
some adjustments to the pivot positions on our arm bone.
| | 01:39 | Coming over to the camera view, I'll press the P
key to switch to Perspective as we are going
| | 01:44 | to add some digits to the hand hub.
| | 01:47 | I will also reposition our Right and Front views,
so we can see our character's hands a little better.
| | 01:55 | If we were to add the digits before making
sure the palm bone is the correct size, we
| | 02:00 | would have a slight problem in that they would
shift position if and when we do adjust the hub scale.
| | 02:06 | And we could use an Edit Poly Modifier to
work around this issue if it is that we have
| | 02:11 | already added and positioned the digits.
| | 02:14 | But as we like to work smart, we are going to
make sure that the wrist bone is the correct
| | 02:18 | size before moving on.
| | 02:21 | I'm going to increase its Height and Width
in the Palm Setup rollout, and then because
| | 02:27 | our character has only three digits to his
hand, I'm going to set the amount to 3.
| | 02:33 | Now we can put them into place.
| | 02:34 | We will double-click the end joint to select
all the bones in the hierarchy and scale them
| | 02:39 | along their local axis again by
changing the reference coordinate system.
| | 02:44 | Now, in the Front viewport, we can scale
them down, then using the Rotate tool with all
| | 02:49 | the bones still selected, I
will add some curl to our finger.
| | 02:54 | I'll then come to the Right viewport and
switch to Wireframe via the F3 keyboard shortcut
| | 02:59 | and just scale the digit down a
little and reposition it as well.
| | 03:04 | Then selecting the first bone in the hierarchy, I
will rotate it using CAT's standard FK functionality.
| | 03:12 | Coming over to our Perspective view, we'll
just orbit around and make sure that it is
| | 03:16 | in the correct position.
| | 03:19 | I've noticed that I just want to increase the size
of this digit ever so slightly with the Scale tool.
| | 03:25 | Rather than repeat this for our second finger,
let's use the Copy command and then select
| | 03:30 | a bone in the second digit and choose Paste.
| | 03:34 | All we need to do now is adjust the digit's
position, and we'll just orbit in our Perspective
| | 03:40 | view and make another subtle adjustment and
then change our digit scale ever so slightly.
| | 03:48 | The thumb is a very similar process.
| | 03:51 | We will double-click to select the
whole chain and adjust its scale.
| | 03:57 | Then using our Rotate tool, curl the digit
into place, and now we will orbit our view
| | 04:05 | and move the thumb into a better position.
| | 04:08 | Once in place, we can use the Scale
tool to match it to our character mesh.
| | 04:14 | Then I'm just going to make some final
adjustments to its position and rotation.
| | 04:21 | As our character has rather large cartoony
forearms, we will increase the size of our
| | 04:26 | rig's forearm bone to better
represent these aspects of the geometry.
| | 04:31 | Coming over to the Bone Setup rollout, I will
increase the Width spinner and then the Depth spinner.
| | 04:39 | Highlighting the Perspective view, I'm just going
to press the C key to return it to the Camera view.
| | 04:45 | Scrolling to the top of our Limb Setup
rollout, I will adjust the name of this limb, then
| | 04:51 | we will click the Color Swatch and use
the same RGB values to apply our Biped Blue.
| | 04:58 | Once we are happy with the results, let's select
our RibCage and click the Add Arm button once again.
| | 05:04 | Obviously, we will want to rename this limb
as well, adding both of our underscores and
| | 05:10 | clicking the Color Swatch and changing this
limb to our Biped Green and then clicking OK.
| | 05:17 | Finally, we want to add one more spine
that can function as our neck and head.
| | 05:22 | So we will just pan our Front and Right views
and then select our RibCage hub and come over
| | 05:29 | to the Modify panel and
click the Add Spine button.
| | 05:33 | Let's simplify the rig a little by selecting
one of the joints in our spine and then coming
| | 05:40 | over to the Modify panel, we'll scroll down
to the Bone Setup rollout and change the amount
| | 05:45 | of neck links to two and then press Enter.
| | 05:49 | Let's change our Right view back to a
Left view, and we'll just pan up to our head.
| | 05:56 | And we'll grab our newly-created
hub and position it within our mesh.
| | 06:01 | Obviously, we will want to
rename this bone as well.
| | 06:04 | I'm going to call it Head_, and yet again click the
Color Swatch and set it to our Biped color, click OK.
| | 06:14 | I also want to change the position of my neck
joints, as this will affect the skinning of our character.
| | 06:20 | Selecting our newly-created hub, we can adjust
the shape of our head, as demonstrated earlier
| | 06:25 | in the course via the Edit Poly Modifier.
| | 06:28 | Coming into elements of Object mode, we can
select the head and reposition it and then
| | 06:34 | use the Scale tool to fill
out the volume of our bone.
| | 06:37 | Now obviously, we still need to
change the shape of our head bone.
| | 06:41 | So I'm going to come into Edge Sub-Object
mode and then enable my Modeling ribbon.
| | 06:47 | Inside the Graphite Modeling Tools tab, I'm going to
enter the Edit panel and click the Swift Loop tool.
| | 06:53 | Inside my Front viewport, I can click once
to create a Vertical Edge loop, and then again
| | 06:59 | to create a Horizontal Edge loop and then
coming into the Left view, I'll create one
| | 07:03 | more Vertical loop and then right-
click to exit the Swift Loop tool.
| | 07:09 | I'm just going to disable my Modeling ribbon
as I no longer need it, and I'm going to come
| | 07:14 | into Vertex Sub-Object mode and adjust
the position of each of the vertices.
| | 07:19 | I'm going to start with the front of the head,
again matching the curvature of our mesh,
| | 07:25 | then adjust the center vertices, and
finally move to the back of the head.
| | 07:34 | Then in the Front view, I'm going to select the
center vertices and switch over to the Scale tool.
| | 07:40 | I'm going to scale these up to fill the
volume of our character's head, and then in the Left
| | 07:44 | view, I'm going to scale them out.
| | 07:47 | Then selecting the outer vertices of our head,
now I'm just going to scale them down and
| | 07:53 | then move them back ever so slightly.
| | 07:56 | Selecting the center two vertices, I am going to just
move them up and then scale them out in the Front view.
| | 08:04 | And I'm just going to make one
last edit to a vertex on my head bone.
| | 08:09 | Once I am happy with the edits I have made,
I am going to right-click inside my Modify
| | 08:14 | stack and choose Collapse All
and then say Yes to the warning.
| | 08:18 | Although we have of course used a somewhat
simplified character design here, you can
| | 08:22 | hopefully see from these two videos just how
quick and easy the creation of a custom rig can be.
| | 08:28 | In our next video, we will move on to
creating secondary bones that can be used to fill out
| | 08:33 | the volume of our character rig.
| | 08:38 |
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| Making good use of secondary bones| 00:00 | Although we have created the main elements
for our character's rig, there are still areas
| | 00:04 | that could be refined a little more in
order to help with both skinning and animation.
| | 00:10 | In this video, we are going to make
use of CAT's Add Bone feature to do this.
| | 00:15 | We can start by selecting the head hub,
come into the Modify tab, and adding a new bone.
| | 00:21 | We are going to use this bone to control
the protrusions on our character's helmet.
| | 00:27 | As always, we want to reposition and scale this
bone, making sure we have it nicely fitted to our mesh.
| | 00:33 | I'm going to enable my Move tool and then just
change the reference coordinate system over to Local.
| | 00:39 | Then selecting the Rotate tool, I'll just do the
same as this will help with positioning the bone.
| | 00:45 | Let's rotate the bone to match the
character's orientation and then pressing the W key
| | 00:50 | we will just move this bone into place
in both the Front and Left viewports.
| | 00:56 | Switching back to the Rotate tool, I'll
rotate this bone back ever so slightly.
| | 01:01 | When moving bones, our edits can be a little
difficult to see in the orthographic views.
| | 01:07 | Let's focus our camera view, and pressing the
P key, we will change it over to Perspective.
| | 01:13 | We can orbit our view to get a better look at
our bone and make any adjustments as necessary.
| | 01:19 | As we can see, the bone at this time
does not fill the volume of our mesh.
| | 01:23 | So, let's come over to our Bone Setup rollout
and increase its Length, Width, and Height.
| | 01:30 | As these helmet protrusions are actually meant
to be made of a bendable material, let's come
| | 01:34 | and choose the Add Bone command once again
to create a smaller bone that can be used
| | 01:39 | to control the end or tip
of our helmet's extensions.
| | 01:43 | I'm just going to select this bone
and scale it down ever so slightly.
| | 01:48 | Using the Rotate tool, we can
also rotate this into place.
| | 01:53 | To shape the bone, I'm
going to use a Taper modifier.
| | 01:57 | Coming over to our Modify panel and dropping
down the Modifier List, we can press the T key
| | 02:01 | and as you can see, this takes us straight
to the Taper modifier so we can just press
| | 02:06 | Enter to apply it to our bone.
| | 02:08 | I'm going to switch the primary taper axis over to X
and just double check that the Effect axis is set to Z-Y.
| | 02:17 | Now I can drag down on my
Amount to round about -0.5.
| | 02:23 | Once I am happy with my adjustments, I'll right-
click the Modifier stack and choose Collapse All
| | 02:28 | and say Yes to the warning.
| | 02:31 | Once we are done, we can reselect our rig's
head bone and click the Add Bone button again.
| | 02:36 | Rather than duplicate the work we have just
done, we can use the Copy and Paste Mirror
| | 02:41 | commands to duplicate our bones and
settings to the opposite side of the helmet.
| | 02:47 | So, let's select our Root Bone
and choose the Copy command.
| | 02:52 | And now we can simply select our newly-
added bone and choose the Paste/Mirror option.
| | 02:58 | This finishes off our head quite
nicely, making everything symmetrical.
| | 03:03 | Another extremely important use for
secondary bones is the creation of compression bones.
| | 03:09 | These are used to prevent areas of the mesh
that bend significantly, such as elbows, knees,
| | 03:13 | and the stomach area, from
collapsing in on themselves.
| | 03:17 | We are going to add a compressed bone to the spine
to prevent compression in our character's stomach.
| | 03:24 | Focusing on our Perspective view, I'm going to press
the C key and switch it over to the Camera001 view.
| | 03:30 | Next, I'm just going to pan my Left and Front
views so I can see the stomach of our character mesh.
| | 03:38 | Let's select our second spine bone, and
then as before, click the Add Bone button.
| | 03:43 | Obviously, we are going to want
to move and reposition this bone.
| | 03:47 | I'm just going to move it in front of the
spine bone that we created it from and then
| | 03:52 | rotate it and finally scale the
bone to fit it into our stomach area.
| | 03:59 | Let's also add a slight taper to this bone
by dropping down our Modifier List. I'm going
| | 04:05 | to press the T key and then press Enter to
apply the Taper modifier to our selected bone.
| | 04:10 | I'm going to make sure that the primary axis is
set to X, and that the effect is also set to Z-Y.
| | 04:17 | Then I can drag down on the Amount spinner
until I get a Taper amount that I am happy with.
| | 04:22 | Just looking in my Left viewport, I want to
increase the volume of this bone by scaling
| | 04:27 | it up ever so slightly.
| | 04:29 | Once we are happy with our edits, we can right-click
in the Modifier stack, choose Collapse All,
| | 04:34 | and then say Yes to the warning.
| | 04:37 | With all of our character's rig elements in
place, we are going to want to see how well
| | 04:42 | this will work with our character mesh.
| | 04:45 | To do this, we need to bind
the rig and mesh together.
| | 04:49 | In our next video, we will use the
3ds Max Skin Modifier to do just that.
| | 04:54 |
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| Creating a rough skin pass| 00:00 | Skinning is without a doubt a complex and extremely
important part of the character creation pipeline.
| | 00:06 | In fact, it is a subject worthy of
an entire course in and of itself.
| | 00:12 | For those reasons, even though we naturally
want to see the rig we have built in action,
| | 00:16 | but we have to state that we will not be
producing a finished skin solution in this course.
| | 00:22 | We will, however, in this video step through
the process of setting up a very rough skin
| | 00:26 | pass via the skin modifier.
| | 00:29 | Firstly, we will need to open up our 3ds Max
Layer Manager and unhide our character mesh.
| | 00:36 | Then selecting the geometry, we will come
into the modify tab and drop down our Modifier
| | 00:40 | list and just press the S key a
couple of times until we see the Skin option.
| | 00:45 | We can then click, and this
applies the skin to our mesh.
| | 00:49 | There are, of course, numerous approaches
that can be used to skin a character, and
| | 00:54 | if you already have some experience in this
area, you may want to follow your own workflow
| | 00:58 | at this point, and that of
course is absolutely fine.
| | 01:02 | One thing I like to do before adding bones
to the skin modifier, however, is limit the
| | 01:07 | number of bones that each
vertex can be weighted to.
| | 01:11 | And this is just a personal preference, but I
feel it makes the initial path of the skinning
| | 01:15 | process a little less complicated,
especially for a cartoony character such as ours.
| | 01:22 | With that said, let's come down to the skin
modifier's Advanced Parameters rollout where
| | 01:26 | we can set the Bone Affect Limit.
| | 01:30 | I'm going to change mine to
a value of 2 and press Enter.
| | 01:34 | Our next step is to make the
connection between character mesh and rig.
| | 01:39 | We do this by adding our CAT
bones into the skin modifier.
| | 01:44 | Coming up to the parameters rollout, you'll notice
we have the option to add bones into our modifier.
| | 01:51 | If we click the Add button, a dialog box
appears, listing all of the objects in our scene.
| | 01:58 | To ensure I add only our rig bones, I'm just
going to scroll down and select OurRig_Pelvis.
| | 02:05 | You'll notice, automatically, all of the
children are selected, but if they are not when you
| | 02:11 | click the pelvis just use the keyboard
shortcut Ctrl+C, and this again will select all of
| | 02:17 | the children associated with this bone.
| | 02:20 | Once that is done, we can
then just choose to select them.
| | 02:23 | Now, if we direct our attention back over
to the modify panel, you can see all of the
| | 02:28 | bones that we had selected have
been added to this skin modifier.
| | 02:32 | To see if our connection has worked, let's
select a bone on our rig and come into the
| | 02:37 | motion panel, then coming down to the Layer
Manager rollout, we can click and add a CATMotion layer.
| | 02:45 | Let's enter animation mode and then
press Play on our 3ds Max animation controls.
| | 02:51 | If the mesh moves along with the bones, we know
that our skin modifier has been applied correctly.
| | 02:58 | To inspect the results of our skin, we can
come back over to the Layer Manager, and this
| | 03:03 | time we want to hide our rig.
| | 03:05 | Now, if we press play on our controls, we
can inspect our mesh for problem areas.
| | 03:12 | Though obviously, we have quite a few, but
the areas that standout the most are the pelvis
| | 03:17 | and hips and also the wrists and hand areas.
| | 03:22 | As we have already mentioned, the process of
skinning a character is a skill set in and of itself.
| | 03:28 | Obviously, what we have done here is the bare minimum
required to bind our rig and character mesh together.
| | 03:34 | I mentioned this because as we move on to
our next step, skinning errors will hopefully
| | 03:39 | become more apparent as we are going to be
creating a stress test animation for our rig.
| | 03:46 |
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| Creating a stress-test animation| 00:00 | With our base rig created, extra bones in
place, and a rough skin pass applied, we
| | 00:05 | are well on our way to
having a completed character.
| | 00:09 | Of course, we are not ready to pass
our rig off to the animators just yet.
| | 00:13 | Our skinning will have a number of
errors that will need to be fixed first.
| | 00:18 | As we have already mentioned, we won't be
doing that in this course, but we will quickly
| | 00:22 | walk through creating an animation test
that will identify the problem areas to us.
| | 00:28 | What we want to do, then, is create what as an
animator is often referred to as a motion stress test.
| | 00:35 | The first thing we want to do is switch
our rig's legs over from using IK to FK.
| | 00:42 | This is just going to make our
animation process a little easier.
| | 00:45 | We will select a bone in our limb, come over
to the motion tab, and adjust the IK/FK slider.
| | 00:52 | Because of a slight bug in CAT we just
need to reset the rotation for our limbs.
| | 00:57 | I'm going to select the ankle bone and then
press the E key to enable our rotate tool,
| | 01:03 | and I can just put this bone back in place.
I'll also do the same for the digit.
| | 01:09 | Selecting the left leg, I will adjust it's IK/FK
slider and again reposition the ankle and digit bone.
| | 01:17 | To start animating, we do of course
need an animation layer adding to our rig.
| | 01:22 | So with the bone selected, let's make sure
we're in the motion tab and come down to our
| | 01:26 | Layer Manager rollout and add an Absolute layer.
Then of course, we will turn on Animation mode.
| | 01:34 | To begin animating our rig, we will come down and turn
on Auto Key and just move the time slider forward 10 frames.
| | 01:42 | And I want to bring our character's
knees up to an extreme position.
| | 01:46 | So I'll select both thigh
bones and rotate them up.
| | 01:50 | I'll also select the lower legs, and I'll rotate these
down to test the skinning on our character's knee joints.
| | 01:58 | Keep in mind that the actual animation here in terms
of where the limbs are going is not the important thing.
| | 02:04 | What is important is that our poses are
exaggerated or extreme, pushing them beyond what will be
| | 02:09 | expected of the character
during animation.
| | 02:13 | With that being said, I'll just push this
pose a little further by rotating our lower
| | 02:18 | legs and then selecting both thighs
and just pushing these further up.
| | 02:23 | You may have seen a stress test
animation where all of the limbs move at once.
| | 02:28 | Personally, I like to be able to focus on
each limb individually, so as to make sure
| | 02:33 | I don't accidently overlook
any flaws in the skinning.
| | 02:37 | Because of this, I'm going to return
each limb to its default position.
| | 02:42 | With both bones selected, I will select my
first set of keyframes, and then holding
| | 02:47 | down the Shift key to copy them, I
will drag them forward 20 frames.
| | 02:52 | If I scrub the time slider forward, you can see this
returns our thigh bones to their original position.
| | 02:57 | So now I can do the same
for our lower leg bones,
| | 03:01 | selecting them, grabbing the first keyframe,
holding down Shift, and then dragging it forward 20 frames.
| | 03:08 | Let's now move forward another 10 frames,
and grabbing our character's right thigh, I'm
| | 03:12 | going to rotate this all the way out,
and then do the same for the left leg.
| | 03:19 | The pelvis can typically be one of the
most problematic areas when skinning.
| | 03:24 | This test will hopefully show up the
areas that can be prone to collapsing.
| | 03:28 | Once we're happy with the pose, we can then
select both thigh bones and come down to our
| | 03:33 | timeline, grab the first keyframe, and just
Shift-drag it all the way to frame 40.
| | 03:39 | If we scrub the time slider forward, you'll see
yet again we return to our default position.
| | 03:45 | Moving forward 10 more frames, I want to
create another splits pose, this time with the leg
| | 03:50 | stretched to the front and back.
| | 03:53 | So I'm going to grab my right thigh and push
this all the way back and then grab the left
| | 03:58 | thigh and rotate all the way forward.
| | 04:00 | Again, let's select our second thigh bone,
come and grab our first keyframe, and Shift-drag
| | 04:07 | all the way to frame 6 there
to return to the default pose.
| | 04:12 | Because creating the rest of the stress test
is just more of the same, going through each
| | 04:17 | aspect of the rig and setting keyframes,
we are going to jump ahead and open a new
| | 04:22 | 3ds Max scene that contains
an already-finished animation.
| | 04:26 | With our finished animation scene loaded,
we can now start to inspect areas of the mesh
| | 04:32 | and find parts of the skinning solution that
will need to be refined before any final animation
| | 04:37 | can be applied to our rig.
| | 04:40 | Scrubbing the time slider back, you will
notice as we already mentioned, there are a number
| | 04:44 | of issues with the pelvis area.
| | 04:47 | It appears as if our hips are
collapsing, and there is a loss of volume.
| | 04:52 | Scrubbing our time slider forward, there are clearly
some issues with the wrists of our character as well.
| | 04:58 | It appears some wrist vertices are weighted
to the leg bones, and the shoulder vertices
| | 05:02 | need weighting to the upper arm bones.
| | 05:06 | Although less than exciting to look at, stress
test animation is a critical part of the pipeline
| | 05:11 | that will take our character from rigging
to skinning and then into final animation.
| | 05:16 | It should neither be skipped nor rushed,
as this is the point at which we want to catch
| | 05:21 | any possible problems
with the rig we have created.
| | 05:26 |
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ConclusionWhat's next?| 00:00 | Although we have reached the end of our course,
I hope your work with the Character Animation
| | 00:04 | tool kit is only just beginning.
| | 00:07 | To help you along the way, I have a few
recommendations I would like to conclude with,
| | 00:12 | the first of which is to encourage you to
really practice working with the essential
| | 00:16 | elements of CAT that we have
worked through in this course.
| | 00:20 | The more familiar we become with the basic
components and workings of CAT, the easier
| | 00:24 | we will find it to rig and animate with.
| | 00:27 | You could also make use of the invaluable
animation and rigging training for 3ds Max
| | 00:32 | under the 3D applications that can already be found
inside the lynda.com online training library.
| | 00:38 | Until we meet again,
take care and happy learning.
| | 00:43 |
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