Lecture 9 - Biped and Physique Modifier

Character Studio – Biped and Physique

Biped can be found in the Systems rollout. Click on biped, and in the perspective viewport click and drag a biped skeleton.

The different bones of the biped can be selected and moved, rotated or scaled. The biped has a built in IK and FK system, making them very easy to manipulate and move.

To re-shape the biped to fit your mesh

With the biped highlighted go to the motion panel. Within the motion panel you need to click onto Figure Mode. Look down the motion panel to the structure rollout. Here you can select the bones and control how many bones the biped contains. Here you can specify whether your biped should have no arms (if you were making a hen for instance), a tail, several neck bones etc. If you click bend links with the tailbones highlighted you can make the tail bend.

What is FK and IK?

When using FK, any chain of links is dominated by the initial link (or the parent). When the parent moves so do the children. If you scale the parent, the children will scale as well.

IK is the reverse of FK, in other words it is the child that can affect the movement of the chain and transfer that movement to the parent.

Biped is cleverly set up with both systems.

Physique

You should make sure that your model is placed in the Da -Vinci pose, with arms and legs outstretched before you use the physique modifier. Make sure your model is in see-through mode, by right clicking the mesh and checking the make see-through box in the object properties dialogue box. (Or use alt x)

The bones of your biped can be around three quarters the size

of your mesh, or can even be larger than your mesh.

With your mesh highlighted, go to the modify panel, and scroll down to the physique modifier.

To identify the biped, you need to attach the node, by clicking the attach node button in the rollout and then selecting the pelvis. When you have done this orange lines will run throughout the biped.

Adjusting the envelopes

More than likely when you move the arm of the biped down to the side of the model, you will see how the mesh pulls. This can be remedied by entering the sub object level of the physique modifier. Click on the small + sign on the physique modifier in the modifier stack. Here you can click on envelope. If you make sure that your model is in smooth and highlight mode, you can see how the mesh will react to changes in the envelope. The envelopes weight and influence the mesh.

Select your mesh – and change to wire frame mode, so that you can see the bones clearly. If you click on the yellow line running through the bones, you will activate the envelope. Where the envelope is influencing the mesh 100% it will be red in colour, if it isn’t influencing it will appear purple.

You can alter the envelopes using radial scale, parent overlap and child overlap, and you can influence the outer or inner side of the envelope or both sides at the same time. You will see the mesh snap back to the bones. If you check shading on the display area of the rollout you can see the weighting quite clearly on the mesh with a colou

r code, in a similar fashion to soft selection.

Creating footsteps

Footsteps can be created automatically or manually.

To produce automatic footsteps, select a bone on the biped, this will activate the motion panel. Click footstep creation button, and a dialogue box will appear with several options for creating footsteps including how many footsteps you require. Click OK and you will see the footsteps have automatically appeared.

If you go to playback the animation nothing will happen until you activate the footsteps. In the motion panel click Create Keys for biped footsteps. The animation should now work.

To produce manual footsteps, select a bone on the biped, click on footsteps, now click on creat footsteps at current frame button. Click and create the footsteps in the top viewport.

You can choose walk, run and jump. Create Footsteps append will add in footsteps if you wish to make your walk sequence longer.

Lecture 8 - Pulling the Curtains - Cloth Collection

Set up a scene using two planes for your curtains with plenty of segments, a pole made out of

a long cylinder, and the curtain hooks made from small cylinders. Make sure that you name all of the parts.

You can only use the cloth modifier with a 2 dimensional shape like a plane, with plenty of segments.

Select curtain and assign a cloth modifier - looks like a t-shirt in the toolbar.

Now we have to put the curtain into a Cloth collection. Run a preview of the animation.

Press P for playback. The curtain drops like a stone because it is not attached to the curtain hooks ( A rigid body).

Go to vertex mode on the cloth modifier, in the stack the top entry has a plus sign to its side. Click on the vertex sub-object level. Scroll down to the constraints area. Click on button which says 'Attach to rigid body'.

Click on Attach to rigid body in the box and change the name to RT1.

Select a few vertices that surround the hook. The vertices should turn red. In the 'Attach to rigid body' box click on the NONE button and in the scene click on the hook. You should then see hook RT1 on the none button. Do this process to the rest of the clips on the Right curtain.

You now need to put hooks into a rigid body collection. Select the clips and add to a rigid body collection.

Once all three clips are attached go to the preview. You can see

that the curtain has got some substance to it and the cloth is attached to the hooks.

Repeat the process for the second curtain.

Animation.

Home in on the curtain clips. Increase the time frame to 250 frames.

Turn on autokey place the slider at frame 150. Move the second hook to meet the first hook.

Move keyframe 0 to keyframe 30 for a one second delay before the curtain opens

Do the same for the other hook.

Highlight each hook one by one, and in the property editor, make sure that ‘unyielding’ is checked.

Preview the animation. Press P.

Lecture 8 - Introduction to Reactor

To access the Reactor tool bar you need to left click on the blank space next to the Render Production button (The last button with a teapot on it) on the main toolbar at the top of the interface. You can then dock the toolbar either at the side of the interface or at the top, which ever you prefer.

To access Reactor, go to the Utilities panel and click on Reactor.

Your toolbar has six different functions: Reactor Collections, Reactor Modifiers, Reactor Objects, Reactor Constraints, the Property Editor and Playback and animation tools.

Click and drag a shallow rectangle into the perspective viewport and angle the rectangle slightly.

Place two spheres above the rectangle.

Because we want the spheres to fall and run off the rectangle, we need to make them rigid bodies.

At the top of the Reactor toolbar is the Rigid Body Collection. Click on this and then click in the view port. In the modify panel, you can see that a box called Rigid Body Properties has opened up. Click on Add, and from the search by name button, highlight the box and the two spheres. Click Pick. The three objects are now in the box.

At the bottom of the toolbar is the property editor, this allows you to add specific physical properties to your objects, here you can provide Mass, Friction and Elasticity.

• Inactive - remove the object from the simulation calculations
• Disable All collisions - causes the object not to collide with other objects
• Unyielding - makes the object immovable
• Phantom - makes objects so that they have no impact on other objects in the scene.

Simulation Geometry:

Before deciding on the collision boundary to use, you need to determine whether and object is concave or convex.

Click on the first sphere, and give it a mass of 5.0 and under simulation geometry change from mesh convex hull to bounding sphere. Repeat this with the second sphere and give it a mass of 15.0.

At the bottom of the toolbar click on preview animation. Now press P and the animation will play.

Lecture 7 - Using the Dope Sheet

The Dope Sheet can be accessed from the graph editors rollout.

Click and drag a teapot into the perspective viewport. Convert to edit poly, and add a squash modifier via the modifier panel. Animate the squash over 100 frames. Also add a coloured material and animate the colour change over 100 frames.

Open the dope sheet, on the left hand side you can identify the teapot object that has been used, open up the transform track and the material track.

The keys in the animation are colour coded:

Green - Rotation

Blue - Scale

Red - Move

As this rollout is so vast, it is easier to concentrate on the areas you want to work on, so go to the left hand corner of the dope sheet and find Filters. We want to check, Show only selected objects and animated tracks.

If you click on edit ranges you can see black range bars which can be moved.

Modify subtree, will allow you to see the black range bars and the keys together.

If you move these bars or keys you can see your animation cha

nge in the timeline. If you right click on the keys you can make changes to the animation, in a similar way to the curve editor.

Lecture 7 - Using the Curve Editor

Click and drag a sphere in the front viewport. Turn on Autokey and move the sphere to the centre of the bottom of the viewport at keyframe 50 and then to the top right hand side of the viewport at keyframe 100.

Right click on the sphere and in Object Properties click on Trajectory.

• The white boxes represent the key frames for the animation
• The white dots represent the frames.

You will notice that the white dots are very close together at the beginning of the trajectory and wider spaced in the middle at frame 50.

• Frames which are close together the animation is slow
• Frames which are far apart the animation is fast

Therefore when you look at this trajectory you will see that the sphere starts slowly and gets faster by frame 50, by frame 100 it is slowing up again. Realistically this w

ould not be the case, if this sphere represents a ball bouncing, the ball would get faster when dropped from a height, would be at its fastest at frame 50 and would bounce out fast loosing its acceleration by frame 100.

This can be changed by using Key Tangencies. If you right click on the key at frame 50, sphere 01 X position, you can use the control box to change the tangent to Fast in and Fast out. When you change this watch the trajectory on the animation and how it changes.

Curve Editor

You can access the curve editor by going to the Graph Editors pulldown or clicking on the small graph sign on the tool bar. This displays the function curve of the animation.

The red graph = X value

The green graph = Y value

The blue graph = Z value

If you right click the small grey boxes on the curve - up comes the same control box to change the tangencies of the curve. To change the slope of the curve manually you use the small handles, and the curve will match the tangent chosen.

Click on the graph icon and Out of Range Tangent Types dialogue box appears. This allows you to step your animation, loop the animation etc.

Lecture 7 - Using the Path Constraint

Go to the create panel > shapes > circle and drag a circle in the front viewport.

Now click and drag a sphere next to the circle.

With the Sphere highlighted, go to Animation on the top toolbar and click on Constraints > Path Constraint.

You should get a dotted line which is coming from the sphere. Click on the circle and you will find that the sphere will jump to the circle.

Now if you play the animation, the sphere will rotate following the path of the circle. 3DS Max has tweened the animation for you.

In the motion panel, you will see that the path constraint has been added to the position list. In the Path parameters you can add weighting to the object that is animated on the path.

If you click and drag a long box and allocate a path constraint to it, you can then see that it has difficulties following the path. Therefore you have to check the ‘follow path’ option and the box will follow correctly.

Using the path constraint with a camera

Now click and drag a teapot into the centre of the perspective viewport. Click and drag a circle around the teapot in the top viewport.

Go to camera > target camera. Click and drag the target camera to the centre of the teapot. With the camera highlighted, go to animation > constraints > path constraint. Then click on the circle. Now the camera will snap to the circle and you can get a rotating camera-eye view of the teapot.

If you want to produce a fly through camera action use the path constraint with a camera. Try setting up some objects and get the camera to fly around them using a path.

Lecture 6 - Animation Basics

There are three main areas of the 3DS Max interface which is allocated to animation. They are:

1. The Track Bar
2. Key Framing Controls
3. Playback Controls

Using AutoKey.

At the base of the 3DS Max interface on the left hand side you can see Auto, Set K and a button with the image of a key on it.

There is also a time line at the bottom of the interface, with a slider, which is called the Track bar.

Autokey is an automatic way of animating with 3DS Max. Click on the Autokey button and you will notice that the track bar and the viewport you are using for your animation will turn red. This is a warning to say that you are in animation mode.

Click and drag a sphere onto the desktop and position it at the top of the front viewport.

Now move the trackbar slider to frame 25. Now move the sphere to the bottom of the fr

ont viewport. Move the trackbar slider to 50, and move the sphere across to the left side of the viewport., repeat this at 75 and move the sphere to the upper left hand side of the viewport. Now turn autokey off.

Now if you slide the slider of the trackbar, you will see your animation, or you can turn on the animation using the Play animation buttons. If you go to the motion panel, and click on the

trajectory button, you can see the trajectory of your animation.

You will notice that everytime that you moved the sphere, a key was created in the trackbar. Shift and click on the key at 0 on the trackbar. This will allow you to copy the key, Drag it to 100 on the trackbar, and now the sphere will return to its original position.

Autokey always places a key at 0 automatically.

Using Set Key

Set Key is not an automated process, and is useful if you want more control over your animation, for instance if you wish to pose a character.

Therefore at 0 on the trackbar you need to click on Set K (this will turn the trackbar red) and then press the button with the key on it. This then sets the key in the timeline

Now move the trackbar to 25, move the sphere, and press the button with the key on it. Scrub the trackbar to see your animation.