max 5 for character animation?

[Nahaz]

Coupled with Character Studio it's fantastic.

[BrandonD]

Depends on what you define as "good." It took a long time before we started getting character tools built into the core of MAX. Prior to that you had to rely on plugins like Character Studio and/or BonesPro. That said, right now out of the box it has average to good IK tools and average skinning. Maya and XSI still have better skinning tools. They also don't have Absolute Character Tools (www.cgcharacter.com), a muscle/skin plugin system, but that's more for the really hardcore character folks (ie Character TDs). Then there's Character Studio, which matured quite well since 1996. It's not an overall character tool, but would be good for 90% of character work out there. It was one of the first tools to support interactive IK/FK at the same time as well as NLA and animated pivot points. The newest version that just shipped supports even more powerful NLA.

So is it good for character animation? Sure.

[Mahlon]

The biggest impedence I've run into so far with max/animation is in skinning. (I've not explored Maya too much, or XSI yet, and probably can't anytime soon) My main poblem with max's skinning tools is that they seem to fall a few degrees short of complete, and they are also pretty cludgey (sp?) system. Maybe can't explain without getting very specific, but there's a lot of moving around the command panel. And the angle deformers are limited in that there's no way to adjust their shape or number of points, other than just include more vertices in their selection. They are also visually a little difficult to work with. And everybody's gripe is that they deform on all axes, so even morph deformer is useful to something only going to rotate around one axis. Still, they produce good results, but it takes a while.

Like Brandon said, I think that max may have average skinning tools.

Haven't used physique for a couple of years and then only cursory, but am going to give it another try since my demo CD of Character Studio 4 came in today!!.

I like the rigging in max, though again, I don't have anything to compare it to other than A:M and a little bit of work with Maya. But from what I undestand from some of the max rigging gurus, max fairs pretty well in this department. But heavy rigs can tend to run slow. I know that from experience.

The way you actually animate in max, I really like. Animation controllers are a great way, and I especially like the reactor controller. Wiring is decent, and overall 'actual' animation in max seems a powerful system.

As far as CS4 is concerned. It looks good to me on spec. Even though I wasn't a big fan of CS3, I'm more interested in this one now. I've got 30 days to find out. Other option is Kaydara MotionBuilder.

If you have specific questions about skinning -- e-mail me and I'll see if I can answer them.

Mahlon

[jarch]

Go to lostpencil.com and get their animation training CD called
"Just Animate - Walk Cycles for 3ds Max".

It's very cheap ($29.95) and really shows you what you can do.


j :)

[LFShade]

Here are some pros and cons to Max's character anim toos, as I see it:

Pro: parameter wiring, custom attributes, script controllers, expressions, and constraints offer many powerful ways to set up a complex rig. I'm completely in love with list controllers - they're fantastic!

Con: adding more than a few these features to a rig will practically cripple the speed of interactivity. Script/wire controllers and custom attributes break when you exceed their animation ranges, making them awkward to work with at times and largely incompatible with the use of curve out-of-range types.

Pro: the new curve and dopesheet editors. It's so much easier now to tweak and organize keyframes. The curve editor that pops up at the bottom is a nice, handy feature.

Con: Discreet didn't see fit to let us put these in the viewports like we used to be able to do with track view. Real bummer.

Pro: new default bezier curve type: auto. It's really nice not having to dig in and correct a bunch of overshooting curves all the time.

Con: not having the ability to set default curve types per controller. Sometimes I'd like only one or two controllers out of a whole rig to always get step keys by default, but there's no way to change the defaults without affecting all controllers of a certain type.

Pro: set key animation mode. Excellent for pos-to-pose animation, and makes it easer than it used to be to experiment with motion. Being able to filter which objects will be keyed by object and controller type is nice, as is the ability to turn on/off individual controllers' keyable property.

Con: there are some minor bugs in set key still. Some objects' properties are randomly keyed, even when 'object properites' is ticked off in the key filters. In particular, point helpers will at times get all of their properties keyed on inexplicably. Doesn't really affect animation, but it gets ugly.

Pro: the Character system. It's a great way to manage a complex character setup, and it provides a nice interface for loading/saving animation clips. Also, being able to load, save, and merge characters is a convenient new way to populate an external scene with actors. Another great thing about the Character system is the whole skin pose thing. Back in Max4.x, I had to write a horrendously complex script to get this functionality, and it still didn't work most of the time. It's great to be able to go into skin pose mode right in the middle of animating it, make some adjustments, and then exit skin pose mode and be put right back where I was before. Great feature!

Con: the whole merge animation thing can be buggy at times, and offers no facilities for saving/loading standard mocap data. Now that would have been interesting!

BIG CON: the skin modifier is crap! Angle deformers can't be edited without affecting the skin (would be good for shaping and positioning). Morph angle deformers don't respect independent positive and negative values of rotation for all axes of their respective bones. Envelopes cannot be copied and pasted around with all their attributes intact (only the cross-section radii are copied). You can't just set up half the character and mirror it over - you have to do the whole thing manually even if your character is perfectly symmetrical. Envelope cross-sections are limited to being circular in shape. Skin vertices can be difficult to select. There are no muscle dynamics or influence objects to help shape the mesh better in difficult areas like the shoulder. Must I go on?

Max is not half bad for character animation, though some of its features are not as robust as in certain other applications. I get a real kick out of setting up characters in Max, although the improvements I would like to see most would be the skin modifier, and the speed of things. Characters don't get bogged down in other packages as easily as they do in Max. I'm sure there's more, but that's what I could come up with off the top of my head.

[Mahlon]

LFShade,

I haven't used the Character grouping yet. One question, when you go back to skin pose mode after you're already in animation, if you want to move some vertices around in relation to bones, do you still have to turn off 'always deform' in the skin modifier? Seems like you would. I've still not gotten the big advantage of skin pose....because it seems like you could just set your 'skin pose' as a set of keys on frame -10 (for example) and accomplish the same thing.

But I do see the advantage in merging animation and what not. Just wonering.

Oh, another question. Do you know Physique? What's your opinion on that compared to Sking for bipedal characters? i.e. they WILL have a shoulder/upper arm setup. I've not used it in a while. I don't think it's changed in CS4 much, though I find out this weekend.

Mahlon

[LFShade]

Skin pose mode is just a bit more convenient than setting things up on a pre-start frame. When you leave skin pose mode, it takes you back to whatever pose you had before entering, whether keyframes were committed or not. So you're free to make on-the-fly decisions about changes to the character or rig without sacrificing any pose work you've done. You don't need to turn off always deform in skin to edit the mesh, you just need to make sure you're not in set key or auto key mode when you make the edits (which should be standard operating procedure anyway, unless you want your vertices animated).

I haven't worked with Physique enough to comment on it, though I've heard from many folks that it's not much better or easier than the skin modifier. Anyway, it's the other 80% of CS4 that I think I would find the most useful ;)

[BigSerge]

Want to just add a con to the new Character system.

Merge animation does not work on riggs with scripts or Wire parameters. Trust me, word came to me from Paul on Discreets forum. He wrote the language for this new feature. I spent an entire Saturday a few months ago trying to merge an animation (It was a nightmare), kept getting errors over and over thinking it's something that I am doing wrong until I posted a call for help on discreets forum. Paul said it only works on simple Riggs and he will work on fixing it. That is last I've heard. I have yet to try it again with the Max 5.1 update (am too scared to do so).

[LFShade]

Yeah, that's what I meant about it being buggy sometimes. I don't think it's been fixed with the update. I never knew that script/wire controllers were the cause, though, so thanks for the info. I try to avoid those anyway, where possible, in favor of expression controllers.

[Mahlon]

Merge animation does not work with script/wire controllers? Grrrrrrrr......is this true? How can?:D :D

Mahlon

[Mahlon]

Oh, by the way, something I was wondering about CS4 (for any of those who've used it): Now that you have list controllers available on the transforms, would that mean it's possible to assign an euler xyz to the rotation tracks of say, finger bones, and then be able to wire custom attributes to this controller? And then how much of that would hold up in the motion mixer? CS4 is still kind of a mystery plug-in. They're not very clear about the integration with standard max tools.

And I thought I'd get to play with it this weekend, but it looks like I can't install and have it run without max 5.1 running in trial mode. I don't understand this maneuver.

Mahlon

[BigSerge]

Sweey lordy lord!!! keep your heads up gents, they might be hope for merge animation. I tell you one thing, I do not know if this fix came with the 5.1 update since I did not try this tool out after the nightmare I had with it but, I am able to paste to existing animation without any errors on a rig with wire prams and scripts (IT FREAKIN WORKED). But By all means it still has some bugs, replace animation and paste to existing animation works with .anm file but an error generates and it does not work if you saved your animtion as .XML (still better than nothing). If you do file merge animation from the menu bar, it does nothing at all, it appears that insert animation in the character set works. Well that's all for now folks I am spending my saturday checking out the character set option when it comes to merge animation especially the paste to existing animation cause that can be very useful. I'll keep you updated if I come across anymore funny business.

Love, Peace, and Chicken Grease:buttrock: :applause:

[LFShade]

That's fantastic BigSerge...but I still get errors when I try it on one of my old rigs with lots of wires and stuff. Could be that it was a character I 'promoted' from R4 to R5, though. My newer rigs don't use any wires or script controllers anyway; but I'm happy it's (sort of) working now :)

[BigSerge]

Okay so It seems to be maintaining like a champ. For example I am able to make 2 animations on a Rig save the .anm files then paste the animation back on .anm1+.anm2+.anm1+.anm2+.anm2+.anm1 etc without any problems. Now I'll take a break on this for today cause tomorrow is the mother test (Pasting a moving walk cycle making the character walk across the viewport). If this works like a champ also then I am sold from now on To make CharacterNodes especially for walk cycles. I can now focus on just making a few steps then merge animation and of course offset my key value to break up the symmetry.

LFShade you may be correct on the old character from R4 to R5. This Rig I am working with I made and am using it in R5.1. Am curious now about your newer Rig not using wires or scripts? you mean it's as basic as can be or you're using lot's of reactor CTRL? share the knowledge baby share the knowledge:bounce:

[LFShade]

I'm actually getting heavy into expression controllers. I've got ones that handle all the advanced stuff like auto-clavicles, wrist twist, stretchy bones, foot roll, finger curling, etc. Expression controllers are extremely powerful stuff, and seem to be a bit more reliable than wires (and perhaps just a hair faster).

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