Character Rigging In 3ds Max.
Introduction:
This tutorial will cover breaking a mesh up into separate elements to be used as bones in an IK rig controlled completely by splines. I will also be skinning the character and using both Wire Parameters and the Reaction Manager to make the task of animating that little bit easier.
To begin, we will need one complete character...
Check ! Now lets begin.
Rule Number 1 Keep your objects centre to the world :
Your characters pivot point should be exactly in the middle, on the X and Y axis. And the most logical place to put it on the Z axis would be right at the bottom. You can alter the Pivot Points of objects in the Hierarchy tab. But if you didn't already know that, I don't advise continuing with this tutorial.
Because we want to use the mesh as the bones and the skin, we need to create a duplicate of our model in the exact same position as the initial model. This is most easily done via the Clone tool in the Edit menu. Be sure that you clone your model as a Copy and NOT as an Instance . The naming of this clone isn't overly important, but should always be considered, as in scenes where you have lots of clones and objects, it can be really annoying to have everything labelled with 01, 02, 03 etc
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With the duplicate selected, right click to open the quad menu, and select 'Hide Unselected' Now all we have is our duplicate. I find it somewhat easier to work with if I also apply a standard material to the clone, it's not necessary, but it helps, for me. The character that I am using has 4 separate elements in total. Two eyes, the sword and the character itself. If you're rigging a character to be exported into a game you will need to keep these elements in the duplicate because in most cases, only one object can be visible when you export.
However, if you're just rigging a character for rendered animation, you can get away with deleting the eyes and the sword duplicates, and then just detaching these elements from the main skin mesh. However, whatever you plan on doing, I recommend keeping the separate elements in the bone mesh.
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Before we start chopping up the mesh. I'd like to introduce Layers , and how they're very, very useful in situations like what we'll be getting into. Start by right clicking to bring up the quad menu, and select 'Unhide All'. Now open the Layer Manager.
With the main skin mesh selected, hit the 'Create New Layer' Button and call it Skin, this will create a new layer containing whatever objects you had selected. You can now safely hide this layer via the Layer Manager window. Now we will have 2 layers, the '0 (default)' layer which contains our Bone Mesh, and the 'Skin' layer which contains our Skin Mesh. For reasons unknown to me, '0 (default)' cannot be renamed or deleted, and since I hate it so much, I usually create a new layer whilst I have my Bone Mesh selected, and name this layer 'Bones'
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You will notice in the image above, that even though I have the layer '0 (default)' selected, the title of the window still reads as 'Layer: Bones', this is due to that little tick on the Bones layer, whichever layer you have ticked, is the layer that new objects will be created in. Which is perfect, as we're about to detach a lot of objects, and with the Bone layer ticked, they will all be put into the correct layer. You will also notice that I have renamed my meshes to avoid any confusion this image might have brought.
So that's the preparation all done, time to start Breaking The Mesh.
