Max Biped for Games

[eek]

Hi RampanT,

At my last company, we pretty much had custom setups. We didnt use CS bipeds at all. (only for testing). I became pretty much in charge of the character pipe. We built a custom pipe as they had to follow specific game skeletal and export issues. Also we could do things like animation loading to and from the engine.

Also characters were very specific, there where quads, birds and 3 headed dragons to name but a few! So most followed a standardized custom rig, but a some were totally unique.

eek

[RampanT]

Hey eek,

Thanks for the reply.

That definately makes sense with respect to the content you guys were creating, whereby the cs biped was not best suited to the task.

I'm just trying to weigh up the pros and cons of using a custom rig. But it seems like the pros become almost irrelevant when you're using mo cap. (we're only doing human characters for the game) I'm just thinking that the main advantage of building a custom rig is to place good controls in the hands of the animators. But if most of the animation will be driven by mo cap, then it seems like a waste of time. The biped seems to give a good stable base for mo cap, then you can add extra bones to the biped for things like facial animation and clothing.

It just seems like the benefits of a custom rig, start to become more of a hinderence when you want to apply mo cap.

Do you have any thoughts on this eek? Or if anyone else has some experience in this area, or points to give, I'd be much appreciative.

[PEN]

I'm a custom rig kinda guy in almost all cases. Mocap is the main one where I will tell you that CS is the better choice. CS makes this task very simple and will save you alot of time doing custom setups that will handle it. If all your characters are bipeds and you will have very limited hand animation done on them just go with CS and save time and money.

[eek]

Hi RampanT,


Well i did mocap capturing and cleanup years ago, using maya and we had custom rigs. (oh and custom mocap solution for that matter!) Anyway as Paul, Harvey and i will all say it depends on your pipe and your production flow; on how you animators want to animate and how each technology will work together. For example with gollum they had a custom pipe,using mocap for it, but then went back in and added more animation,tweaks etc etc. Plus different techniques such as pure keyframe animation, and rotoscoping were used.

Also take for example Kees and puppetshop, its a custom pipe but can still take in BVH data, the other factor is how you wanna use the mocap data,are you gunna do key frame animation with true style fcurves? as CS is TCB(i.e you have sliders and its parametric)

If in the end you strict on just biped, and mocap data with relatively little or no keyframe animation needed, and just clean up then go for CS. Its great for this with its motion mixer, and foot driven approach.

Is this going to be for one project also?, i.e is this going to be the generalised pipe for all your games and projects? or just for this game? Are you always going to do bipeds?

So its a big balancing act! gotta way up both solutions: CS is off the shelf instance mocap solution, but wont deal with any kinda custom pipe (unless you do lots of scripting!), but your'll get instance results. And even most engines work with it.

Custom pipes: are what you make them. In essence they can do anything but your'll need lots of R&D, to get the best results and go through many iterations. (its why people grab Paul and i for custom pipes, because most of the problems have been ironed out via our own R&D)

Its best to discuss it with the heads of you company, graphics, animation leads, and examine the full project and what your'll exactly need.

eek

[RampanT]

Thanks very much for the informative responses. Much appreciated.

We are currently in early pre-production, so all avenues are being explored. But the definites in terms of animation are that there will only be human characters, and we will be using mo cap. I was discussing some issues with a 3rd party company that provides mo cap solutions today, and was told that they can work with custom rigs or cs bipeds. But with the custom rig, they prefered that all of the IK and custom controls were removed, because it wasn't needed.

As far as I know, the solution we're aiming for is for this project only, rather than for a series of projects.

Do any of you guys know if its possible to apply BVH data to custom rigs in Max? Obviously the cs biped will run BIP or BVH, but is there a way of applying BVH data to a custom rig without the aid of a 3rd party solution provider?

Again, thanks for your help. I'm very appreciative that guys with your level of knowledge take some time to help out.

Cheers.

[batour]

bungie used biped to create characters for halo 2 and rockstar did the same for san andreas / vice city.

[Harvey]

You can import motion capture onto custom rigs in max...however its not at "out of the box" solution..but something you will have to create yourself. If you are dealing with a lot of motion capture and you don't have a lot of dev time for your own rigs just go with a "canned" solution. That said I personally would avoide the character studio biped canned solution and go with CAT. It is far more flexible and custimizable than Biped.

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