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InfiniteEight
10-22-2009, 03:21 AM
Heyo folks, quick question! I just modeled a low poly character in 3ds max and now it's time for some rigging. I plan on creating a short animation with this character. Should I use a biped or bones? I figure biped will be a lot quicker and less setup. But would I be better off creating everything from scratch?

Also, my character is currently several different objects (upper body is one object, pants are another, shoes another, etc). Should I make all of these parts one editable poly object or is it all right to have a Skin instanced on them separately?
dunkelzahn
10-22-2009, 10:30 AM
Use biped (itīs easier to use straight from the box) and skin your objects with seperate skin modifiers to the biped rig ( Easier to do the finetuning skinning).

Have fun

Chris
InfiniteEight
10-23-2009, 01:25 AM
Thanks, Chris! These were my initial plans, but I wanted to make sure. Your answer is much appreciated!
InfiniteEight
10-23-2009, 05:25 AM
All right, so I actually have another question. :P

When animating the bipeds arms, should I do it by moving the hand (IK) or rotating each bone individually (FK)? I'm setting up a range of motion to adjust the Skin on my mesh and I realized that on one frame I rotated the upper arm and on another frame I moved the hand to position the arm. Doing this seems to have twisted the mesh a bit at the shoulder.
dunkelzahn
10-23-2009, 10:27 AM
At the beginning, simply rotating should be the easiest way to get into the biped system. When you get a grasp of FK processes in biped you can progress to IK animation processes. Mixing up both processes in the beginning isnīt the best idea ;)

Have fun

Chris
Dave_Hingley
10-23-2009, 11:56 AM
to be fair, if you are animating in biped and you haven't got the arm keyframes filtered, theres no reason why you cant use both FK and IK, biped doesnt care either way you can pose an arm either by working down the chain and rotatin- FK style or by moving the hand- IK style, Biped stores keys for all joints in one keyframe in the hand you can access them in any part of the arm if that makes any sense
InfiniteEight
10-24-2009, 02:22 AM
After messing around with biped for a few hours today setting up my character's range of motion I'm beginning to understand it a little better. I went ahead and set the arms up on separate tracks that way I'd have more control over the hands and fingers. Once I start animating I think there'll be a good bit for me to learn. Things like footsteps, IK/FK blending, etc.

I once played around with a bone rig that had IK arms and dummies as elbow targets. Does Biped have anything like that if I decide to use some IK? Or would that involve FK (manually rotating the upper arm after moving the hand)?
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10-24-2009, 02:22 AM
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