From the course: 3ds Max 2020 Essential Training

Understanding hierarchies - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2020 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Understanding hierarchies

“

- [Instructor] In this chapter on rigging we'll learn about setting up an animation hierarchy or a system whereby we can for example pose a character. In this example I've got a friendly artist mannequin and it is already set up with a hierarchy or a system of links between objects. And if I select an individual object, such as this shoulder then if I transform it then the other body parts will follow even though they are separate objects. To make it a little bit easier to see I'm going to disable the selection brackets on this scene, press the J key to turn those brackets off and also to make it a little bit easier to see I'm going to enable that option so that this leg of the object will have edged faces. Go into the view port menu in this perspective view, to the right most menu that's labeled default shading. Click on that and choose display selected, display selected with edged faces. And now the selected object will have edged faces making it a little bit easier for us to identify what's selected and what's not when we do a transform such as rotate. So we'll go to the rotate tool and rotate in an axis and we can see that the other objects are following. I've got angle snaps turned on here so I can turn that off and press Control Z to undo that rotation. So there is a linkage or hierarchy between the objects in this scene and the shoulder object is a parent of this elbow object. The elbow is in turn the parent of the wrist. There are two basic rules about hierarchies, one is that children inherit their transforms from their parents and the other is that a child can have only one parent. First let's talk about transform inheritance, we just saw that with rotations but of course position and scale are also transforms. If I choose the move tool and select an object its children will follow that position. I'll undo that Control Z and likewise with scale, scale is inherited by children, I'll undo that. The other rule is that a child can have only one parent. So for example this wrist object has one parent which is the elbow and likewise all of the objects have just one parent, however a parent can have many children. For example I've got the pelvis object here in the center. And it has three children, the chest and these two hip objects, if I select the pelvis, and scale it, then everything in the hierarchy scales with it, everything in the hierarchy scales together because all of the objects are either children or descendants of the selected pelvis object. I'll undo that again with Control Z. We can visualize the hierarchy in the scene explorer. Let's open that up I've got it currently hidden. And in the scene explorer I just see one object the pelvis. But it's got a little left facing triangle next to it which means I can open up that pelvis object and see its children and I can easily open up the entire hierarchy just by right clicking in the scene explorer and from the quad menu I can choose expand all and now we see all of the parent child relationships for this hierarchical structure in which children inherit transforms from their parents. That's the basics of a hierarchy.

Contents