Tag Archives: 3ds max

Production Blog – Motion Builder To Max Workflow P1

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It has been a busy couple of weeks, so my progress on this project slowed a bit while I caught up on some things.  The good news is that I have not yet given up, and I do have some progress to show.

The next goal of this project is to design a rig that can easily accept motion capture data.  The rig should be able to be animated in tandem with the motion capture data.  Motion capture data will be set to an animation layer, while any hand keyed animation can be created on a second layer.  This makes it possible for the user to blend between systems, or to turn one source of completely if needed.  To achieve these goals, I designed a system of layered controllers.  I recently found a video on The Area that discusses a method for doing something very similar to what I am trying to achieve.  I won’t be explaining my entire rig structure in this post, so go ahead and check out the video on The Area if you want to get an idea of how my Hero rig is structured.  I will be providing an in-depth look at my rig once I settle on a final design.

So this week I got the rig working fairly well.  I still see some hiccups where my hierarchy’s are not setup perfectly, but for the most part, the mo-cap animation is transitioning smoothly to my custom setup with little more than an FBX import.   I can still use my custom animation controls to make changes to the animation I am getting out of Motion Builder, and the whole process looks to be easily automated.  I would call this a win.  This video will show the custom rig being driven by the motion capture animation.  Keep in mind that the custom rig has no baked animation on it.  All of the attributes are still pristine and ready for some hand animated goodness.  In my next post I will show how these multiple systems can be brought together to create a polished animation.  I will also be working on finding a better video compression for my Vimeo uploads.  The videos are coming out choppy.

 

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Production Blog – Designing a Custom Character Rig

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In this post I want to talk about the process I am going through to design the rig for my Hero character.  I stated in an earlier post that I have a designated feature set that I want this rig to have.

  • Animator Friendly.
  • Works with animation layers.
  • Can allow for animating in parallel to motion capture data.
  • Can be procedurally generated.
  • A modular system.  This means individual limbs or modules can be hooked together to adapt to any character type.

Before I set out to fully design the rig, I thought it would be a good idea to get a feel for Motion Builder and it’s requirements.  For this test I used a biped skeleton, with some very rough skin weighting.  I got the motion capture data from CMU’s free motion capture library.  Here is the result.

Next I wanted to test how easy it would be to get the motion capture back into Max.  That process is actually very easy, but remember that I need to get the data on to my rig in such a way that I can still animate my control objects in tandem with the mo-cap data.  I have seen a couple ways of achieving this.  One way is to use CAT or Biped as your rig.  That idea was not appealing at all.  I have also seen people bake the motion capture data on to the skeleton via a character definition which defines which bones attach to which controls.  This is probably a simpler method, but I would still end up with baked key frames and no easy way to control the amount of influence the motion capture and hand keyed animation would have over my final game skeleton.  So like most things, I decided to try doing this the hard way.  I started with a single leg that has something similar to a reverse foot rig as it’s animation controls.  I then layered in new nodes that would act as a buffer between my imported mo-cap and the animation controls.  The end result is promising, but a still have more tests to run, and of course I will need to make this work for the whole body.

As I was creating this setup, I tried to be vigilant about scripting the steps in Maxscript.  This will make it much easier for me later on when I write the final rigging tools.  I would like to thank Randall Hess for lending some guidance while I am transitioning to Maxscript. Randall wrote this excellent post that shows how to generate bones from a biped.  That post gave me the boost I need to confidently begin writing a Max auto rigger.

In my next post, I will reveal the results of my attempt to apply this mo-cap transfer method to an entire custom Max rig.  I will also be talking about some of the rigging choices I made.  Finally, I will reveal a bit more behind the scenes info on how I am constructing the rig.  For now I leave you with this image that shows a sample of the hierarchical structure I used to design the foot.

 

 

 

 

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