inexperience with CAT riggs (Max 2010)

#1

Hello,

I’ve been searching for answers past 2 days with no success to get my CAT rigg to work properly. I’m making animation with stylized character and everything works fine except the upper arm twist bones. I’m working in max 2010 and it’s very tough to follow, which CAT features changed along with Max releases. I’m hoping you guys can help me.

I have 4 twist bones on the upper arm and in order to rotate them altogether, I have to use forearm. But the way Bone Twist Weight has to be set to not deform elbow, it makes all other twist bones rotate unevenly which results in ugly deformation.

Now I’m trying to fix this issue with angle deformers and CAT muscles to keep the
volume of the upper arm, but none of it can fix the deformation of a twist and if it does, it casues problems elsewhere…

I know shoulder rigging is advanced, but there has to be a way CAT handles this,
I have a simple character model with straight tubes as limbs, am I missing something obvious?

#2

While waiting for admins to validate my first post here, I’ve managed to figure it out.

I’ve made 4 additional CAT bones on the upper arm, which weren’t parented to each other. 1 of the bone is controller and not used for skin weight. For each bone I’ve enabled Animation controller and Additive to setup pose in the Hierarchy panel.

Then I’ve created ExposeTm helper and conected it to the controller bone, and used it’s parent (upper arm) for local reference node. After that I used wire parameters on other 3 twist bones and connected them with ExposeTm helper on the x axis, each with it’s own value, so they rotate evenly.

It’s not the automatic solution, but still better than CATs native twist bones.

#3

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