From the course: Animating in 3ds Max: Constraints, Controllers, and Wire Parameters

What is an animation rig? - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: Animating in 3ds Max: Constraints, Controllers, and Wire Parameters

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What is an animation rig?

- Before we can animate even fairly simple objects in 3DS Max, we will more often than not need to know how we can go about rigging them first of all, something that we can use the tools featured in this course to do. Naturally, though, if we are completely new to the world of 3D animation, we may well find ourselves asking at this point just what an animation rig is. Well, probably the most basic description we could give is that an animation rig is a digital skeleton or set of control objects that give an animator the ability to move and pose a 3D model or system, something that could otherwise perhaps be unusable for animation or that would, at the very least, be difficult to work with. Perhaps the most obvious examples of animation rigs in 3DS Max come in the form of the built in CAT and Biped Character solutions that are pretty much ready to work with right out of the box. When correctly applied to a character model, these complete rigging and animation systems give an animator the ability to bring many types of characters fully to life. And although character animation isn't really involved in the examples that we will be using in this course, the tools and concepts that we will be discussing could most certainly be used to build extremely complex and multi-functional character based rigs from the ground up in Max. Now of course, that concept of building from scratch is something that pretty much all visualization animators and riggers will need to learn to do as there are no pre-built mechanical rigging and animation systems installed within Max, meaning anything we want to do has probably got to be created one piece at a time. Not that creating animation rigs in Max needs to be either long winded or laborious. In fact, as we work through this training course, we will probably come to realize that keeping rigs for even the most complex of objects or systems in our scenes as simple as possible is the way to add both speed and quality to the rigging and animation process. Well with that quick and simple definition of an animation rig in mind, then, and with the reminder that, without a rig, animation in any 3D application can, at best, be extremely difficult, let's move in to the final video of our introduction chapter and take a few minutes out to get a clear understanding of the important role that object pivot points can play in the construction of any animation or animation rig.

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