Quote: Original post by neilski_2003
It wasn't a requirement at an initial level, but it was if i wanted to achieve the top grade possible.

I am currently working on creating a 'human' skin for the character but its quite time consuming particulalry when it comes to the weightings for each bone.

As your a GDNet+ member could i ask if you think its worth the sign up. It'd probably helpful for the discount on books - as i suppose a good collection of reference material can be as helpful as anything else. Apart from that is there any other good reason for me making the purchase.

Cheers for your feedback.

Neil

well if you're beginning in animation go here, you'll need as subscription to the site though, but the animation and rigging section allowed me to teach myself the basics rigging and animation within 2 days.

Quote: Original post by neilski_2003
It wasn't a requirement at an initial level, but it was if i wanted to achieve the top grade possible.

I am currently working on creating a 'human' skin for the character but its quite time consuming particulalry when it comes to the weightings for each bone.

As your a GDNet+ member could i ask if you think its worth the sign up. It'd probably helpful for the discount on books - as i suppose a good collection of reference material can be as helpful as anything else. Apart from that is there any other good reason for me making the purchase.
Neil

Mmm fair enough, I figured it was something like that, shame though :). I guess it's handy to have that experience, but now that your course is over it's definately worth doing some biped work. As you say, you are interested in animation now and the best tool for doing that most efficiently is max bipeds.

Anyhoo, I mainly use my + for the journal and getting rid of the nasty adds, but I think i've got a couple of discounts on some stuff, not sure that it'll pay for itself if thats your only requirement though... Tis cool to have custom avatars [smile].

Quote: Original post by DogCity

Quote: Original post by neilski_2003
It wasn't a requirement at an initial level, but it was if i wanted to achieve the top grade possible.

I am currently working on creating a 'human' skin for the character but its quite time consuming particulalry when it comes to the weightings for each bone.

As your a GDNet+ member could i ask if you think its worth the sign up. It'd probably helpful for the discount on books - as i suppose a good collection of reference material can be as helpful as anything else. Apart from that is there any other good reason for me making the purchase.
Neil

you are interested in animation now and the best tool for doing that most efficiently is max bipeds.

that depends really, biped is easier for most, but i find that a correctly setup custom skeleton rig seems to increase workflow alot for me. i say try both biped and your own skeleton bone rig and see which one you're more conformatbale with.

Cheers for all your responses.

Dog City you mention a character studio biped, is this a seperate package to 3DS Max? I've been using the university package and won't ahve that for much longer so if they are seperate packages i will have to look about and see where i can get it from.

Is the biped a skinned chaarcter that can be animated in a similar way to a generated IK system or is it simply a more detailed bones system that still needs individual skinning?

Cheers once again for all your help.

Neil

The bipeds came from a seperate commercial plugin called 'character studio'. It was included free with max 5 I think, and completely integrated in max 6 (I may be thinking a version to early though) so check your uni version.

The biped is a set of prebuilt bones which have extremely accurate movement ranges. In addition a selection of tools compliment it, for sticking hands/feet, creating somewhat automatic walk cycles and copying/inverting positions and such.

Check out this tutorial for a good introduction: Anmating Lara Croft

It became integrated in Max7, it was a not-free plugin before that (in Max6, IIRC). Also, Physique is pretty outdated, use Skin modifier instead.

An excellent resource on all things Biped is "3ds Max Animation with Biped" by Michelle Bousquet.

It really excels in combining pre-built motions/poses (including mocap), in addition to other things. You can pre-build shorter sequences, and combine them together while isolating only certain areas of each animation, blend them, etc. And its already set up with IK (not sure about FBIK, but I think to some degree). Really a great realistic-character-animation tool.

You still need to skin/bind your model, with any rigging/bones system you already have.