The Project of Everything

#1

Hello Everyone,

My project of everything is like a roadmap for me to achieve a good understanding of every steps that I should take to rig and animate a 3d character. I have partly good skills in modeling and texturing and I want to master in remaining areas of 3d character development.
I know this is not easy and it definitely takes months and years. but I’m a patient student. lol
btw here is a simple character which I’ve modeled. and I’m going to do some biped exercises on it. It’s an extremely low poly character, done in 3dsmax. The applications that I use are 3dsmax 2009, Maxon Bodypaint and VRay.
Rigging using biped or hierarchy of bones, character animation and facial animation are the key topics I’m gonna discuss and practice in this thread.
Comments are very welcome and appreciated. I really need ur opinions.

Thanks

#2

I made a texture to make it more pleasant for the eye while I’m working on rigging part. :smiley:

OK, I set up a biped inside the character mesh and then I applied physique modifier.
One thing that I noticed first was that when I switched to vertex sub-object I experienced
a lot performance decrease. (poor 8800 GT is possibly the reason. my CPU is fast enough. core i5 + 4G of RAM). So I decided to tear up the mesh (body, arms, feet, head, … ) and apply an instanced physique for all the parts. So I could hide and unhide the unnecessary parts to increase the performance. I don’t know whether this is a standard pipeline or not and if I’m gonna face difficulties as the work goes forward? I need your advice on this.

The kind of behavior I’m looking for this armored body is rigid movements unlike soft human or animal flesh… . So I used the rigid type for all the envelopes. and then I adjusted the envelopes of the upper body and in vertex sub-object I defined precisely weights of vertics for each deformation spline. I tried different combinations and weights and none of them were satisfying. Here is a video which demonstrate the problem:

[vimeo]17880877[/vimeo]

separately in another scene I also set up a few master/slave relationships in reaction manager dialog for shoulder pads. This is exactly the kind of rigging I’ve considered for this character. I know that I can combine a biped with external hierarchies. but I don’t know how to bring this feature into my biped. is it possible?
Here is the video with master/slave relationships:

[vimeo]17880897[/vimeo]

Note: I also uploaded the biped scene. download it from HERE .

your POVs are kindly requested and highly welcome.

#3

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