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ankheilw
04-02-2009, 06:22 PM
Hello all,

I'm sure somebody out there knows this right off the top of their heads:)

I am animating something in Max with a tail. The main chacter is rigged using a standard Biped skelaton, but because of the anatomy of the character, I opted to use max bones for the hind quaters and the tail. I am doing animation on the tail now, and, unlike the Biped spine, I have to animate each bone by hand. Instead of say, grabbing all the bones and rotating them and having them all curl, only the highest bone in the heirarchy that I have selected rotates.

I am a Maya guy primarily, and this is standard in Maya. Any idea how I can get all the bones to curl together instead of trying to hand animate each one?

Thanks in advance.

DJ-Nicke
04-03-2009, 12:04 AM
Unfortunately you have to script it.

I hate that too, and I'm sure it was different back around version 5.

Anyway, you can walk down the hierarchy by pressing "page-down" on your keyboard.

So just select the base of the tail - Rotate - Page-Down - Rotate - Page-Down - etc...

I hope that helps!

dunkelzahn
04-15-2009, 03:10 PM
If itīs not too late, you might look up spline IK in the manual.

Cheers

Chris

mef
04-15-2009, 05:51 PM
You can wire the parameters of each bone node so that it looks at the next link so that you only need to rotate one node to affect the next.

rAndall
04-16-2009, 03:39 PM
If they are aligned properly you should be able to just double click the root of the tail, which selects all of the children, and rotate on the axis to create your curl.

ankheilw
04-16-2009, 04:06 PM
Thanks for all the ideas guys. What is wierd is that it works incredibly easily in Max 2009. Max 8 seems to have a problem. I'd like to go the wire paramater route, but it seems just as easy to rotate them all individually since I eventually offset them in the animation to give the tail a bit more weight.

Thanks again for all the replies and all the thoughts.

Woody

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