Biped vs Bones

[toonman]

Originally posted by Sizzlenuts
Hey there,

Just curious as to peoples opinions as to which approach they prefer to doing character animation.

Biped or Bones

Biped -
My experience is that it is frustrating using the Biped due to the amazing amount of bugs that it has. Here's a short list of a few that plague me the worst

When I try and move keys around it errors out with a Bip01 error saying that I cant because one of 3 reasons which are never true.

When I use constraints either with dummies or sliding keys to lock the feet, neither layers or copying bip anims from one skeleton to another work anymore.

Not having curves is a drag. But not having to build the skeleton is cool.

Bones -
Once you figure out how to zero out the curves these are not so bad but the track view editor is so crappy my frustration boils over anyway

I zero out bones but sometimes it forgets and when I try going back to the zero pose it says they weren't frozen to begin with.

Curves are way to wild due to the stretchy handles which create a lot of extra work refining the motion.


Anyone else?
:buttrock:

Biped has its uses... it's a damn fast way of setting up a character... it takes like 2 secs! IK included and everything... however, it also has some issues that most users (as yourself) are aware of (like the ones you mentioned).

Bones are waaay slower to create (a decent sekelton can take an hour or so), but offer more versatility, from my HPOV. I personally prefer bulding my own rigs all the time, unless I'm in a real hurry... I can even create 'behaviors' in my rigs, if needed. I can also automate a lot of stuff, and I can get them to behave closely to a biped (like the animatable multi-pivot feature), plus some more stuff, like special skin-onlt bones and stuff. Anyway, that's just me. One of my co-workers here enjoys using biped, and is a pretty good character animator, so, if it works for him (and he delivers his shots on time!), then it's ok.

As for your bone-zeroing problem, all you've gotta do is use list controllers. Leave the first controller as a bezier/Euler controller, and start animating from the second controller. The first one will zero out your bone (if I understood your problem correctly). And yep, you gotta watch for overshoot in your curves, but I'm ok with it.... I actually use it, unless it goes to the extreme... it gives me a more natural motion curve.

Hope this helps. Anyway, as I said, this is just me...

[Sizzlenuts]

Thanks for your reply, Here's a question specific to it.

What I have been doing to zero out curves for bones or Nulls is alt-right clicking to get a specific freeze transform that adds a zero controller underneath the original euler controller in the track view.

Is this the same as using a list controller or is the list controller better?

:buttrock:

[Mahlon]

If you want to avoid that overshoot, Michael Comet has cometSmooth -- in his Key Manager 4.4 script.

http://www.comet-cartoons.com/toons/maxscript.cfm

Mahlon

[LFShade]

Sizzlenuts:

Yes, Freeze Transform on the animation RCMenu does the same thing Toonman suggested. But it absolutely won't hurt to go through the exercise of doing it manually. List controllers are damn nifty, and anything you can learn about them will help in the long run.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.