From the course: 3ds Max: Character Rigging

Setting up layers - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max: Character Rigging

Start my 1-month free trial

Setting up layers

“

When you start rigging your character, you're going to add a lot of additional objects into the scene. You're going to have the geometry of the character, but you'll also have skeletons and control objects for the animator to use to manipulate the rig. So, we need to keep all of this organized, and we're going to start off with our organization by using layers. So, I'm going to go ahead into my Manage Layers window here, and let's go into our Layer Explorer. And I want to go ahead and create some blank layers for us to use later when we rig the character. Now, the first one I need to use is for the actual geometry in the character. So, let's go ahead and create a new layer, and I'm going to call that GEOMETRY, for the geometry in the scene. Now, all we have to do is basically just open up the default layer and we can select all of these objects here, which are all the geometry in the scene and we can drag those into that layer. But in addition to this geometry layer, we'll also have additional layers, such as the controls for the animator to manipulate the character. So, let's go ahead and create a layer and we'll call that CONTROLS. And in this layer, we'll put all the animation controls for the character. And then we need some additional ones. We're going to need one for the skeleton that deforms the character. So, we're going to create one called SKEL_DEFORM. And that's for all the bones that are going to deform our character. But, we will also create some bones that don't deform the character, and these will be things like helper bones, or the ends of bone chains, and that sort of thing. So, let's create one more, and we're going to call this SKEL_NONDEFORM. Now, you can name these anything you want. I'm trying to name them descriptively so that you can just look at it and understand what's going on. So, go ahead and set up some blank layers for your character, and then we can move on from there.

Contents