Animation

Animation!!!

 

After the stressful weeks of completing the stress test it was time to animate. Which was another milestone and not a very easy task. Animating in 3ds max using the CAT Parent has its benefits and its disadvantages. This is because CAT has its own pre-set movements but of course they haven’t done all the movements that will be required for this project.  This basically meant that absolute layers had to be created and animations created frame by frame. This proved to be very time consuming and not a lot of time was left so this had to be left out

The good thing about animating using the pre-sets in character studio was that for example the user had a dodgy walk it can be edited so that even the arms could rotate as the user wished. Also once the walk has been achieved and the character now needs to move across the screen it wasn’t such a long process. What the user would have to do is draw the line in which they want their character to follow, after they just create a dummy and a path constraint to the dummy so it can follow the line. An important aspect which many individuals forget to do is check “Follow” in the path constraints menu. If this step is not complete the character will not link well with the dummy and there for the whole process will have to be started again.

Once the step above is complete, now the character can be attached to the dummy which is very a simple step. The user should select one bone from the rig and go onto the motion tab, with their movement layer selected they should press the button which looks like an animal paw, this button would have also been used to edit the characters walk or run, once open there is a tab on the right called “Global” and the user should select this. Once this opens up the user will get 3 options and one of those options would be for the character to follow a “Path Node” the only way the character can follow the path node is if it’s selected. This is where the dummy comes in if the user selects the “Path Node” button and selects the dummy the name of the dummy will appear instead of path node. Then all the user needs to do is check follow path node.

This is a very important step if the character is to walk up and stains or along a road. The user then needs to go on “” and select the “Ground” button and select where the character should walk on. This may take a few try’s to get it correct which is another stressful element when animating. But once it actually works it is very interesting to watch the character walk, run or even hop along a line in 3ds max.

CAT has its own pre-set movements but these can be edited to meet user needs and if edited correctly the character can be made to hop and even jump. This will require a lot of time and tests before being added to an animation. Another thing character studio allows when editing is to merge movement so the character can start of on a walk then could creep to show something is about to happen or they are hiding and then go straight into a sprint. All of these movements described can be linked together and others so that characters can go from doing one thing and change in a smooth realistic way to a different movement.

 

Animation is very time consuming with things like ships and vehicles and just bigger models so animating a character to run frame by frame would be a huge waste of time where it is a pre-set in character studio. All the user has to do is ultimately is conduct a stress test which many individuals might not want to.

Absolute layers allow for the user to animate any movement which they may find difficult to relate to when playing around with the rig settings, as mentioned before this is a frame by frame process which for this project is very time consuming so pre-sets where used for this project because of time issues.

Stress Test

Stress Test

This is a truly stressful task and very time consuming so this post will start with a recommendation, anyone who is even thinking about doing a stress test some recommendations would be, do a lot of research about it first for example there is a YouTube channel called 3ds max learning channel which teaches a great deal about this subject and element of character studio. Another recommendation would be if there is a deadline to stick to make sure this part or milestone of the project has a great deal of time allocated to it because this process can take weeks to perfect. The last recommendation is when everything is going wrong try and get a peer or a friend to watch over while creating the rig because it adds an extra level of concentration if the stress test goes wrong the first couple of times.

This has been the biggest struggle of this part of the project and its because it has been underestimated and for this the price has had to be paid dearly for this mistake. The stress test has set the project back because of time issues the animation which was intended to be created now cant be because of the amount of time spent trying to get the stress test right. Instead if my final idea being the animation a sort of snippet or trailer would have to be created in its place.

So once the rig has been built its time to begin the stress test which isn’t difficult but more fiddly. This is why the bones created in the rig are very important they match the mesh for first timers. The stress test can be completed in many different ways and it can be done either manually or automatically, the reason for the stress test is to make sure that the bones created in the rig are attached to the correct part of the mesh, as simple as this sounds it’s a very difficult task if the rig has not been created properly.

To start the stress test the mesh needs to be attached to the rig, this can be done from the modifier list and by selecting “Skin”. Once this has done the user has to simply select add in the options list in the skin modifier and a list of bones will appear created from the rig. It took a while to get it right for this project and will be explained later in the post but for now all the bones need to be selected by pressing “All” and then selecting “Select”. This will add all the bones created from the rig and put them in order from head to toe for the user. Once this is done if “Editable Poly” is underneath “Skin” underneath the modifier when the mesh is selected the user should make sure no editable element is selected for example Poly select, this is because the rig will still think the user is editing and therefor will not attach to the mesh.

Next step that is the stress test itself is to select one of the bones in of the mesh and select the “Motion” tab; this will open up a motion panel for the CAT Parent. There is an option about mid range of the motion panel which has ABS written in green writing, this would allow the user to add an Absolute layer to the rig which will allow the user to do a manual stress test. For the purpose of time this project will go through how to do the stress test automatically because doing it manually will take time and will require the user to animate movements frame by frame.

So if the user selects the “ABS” Button and holds it down further options will appear, these options will allow the user to do further editing but the one used for this project is the last one which looks like a small man running. If the user selects this nothing will happen to the mesh yet. The next part and is the moment of truth is to select the stop button above the layers display and press play. This will show if the bones match with the mesh because the bones will move and since they have been linked with the skin they will try and move with the skin.

If this is the users first time doing this test then it will most definitely not look correct and parts of the body will be left behind and it will just look very very bad. This is not a problem and can be fixed but just incase the bones like explode in size and everything becomes distorted which happened a couple of time during stress test for this project the best way and is recommended is to just close 3ds max and re open it and make a new rig. If its not exploded and everything looks the same size as you made then you are ok.

The next step and the way to fix the distortion problem would be press the stop button and re select the mesh and go back to the “Skin” modifier. Once the skin modifier is open select the “Edit Envelopes” button in the options underneath. The bones will disappear and black lines will be replaced, this are basically the envelopes in which link the mesh to the bone and has a sort of heat sensor look to them once they are selected. This is now the fiddly part because the user must now move, expand and retract these lines so that the right part of the mesh is connected to the right part of the bone. One recommendation at this point is that the red areas highlighted on the mesh show that that part of the body is linked 100% to that bone, blue mead that another bone is occupying that particular part of the mesh and orange or yellow means that only part of that mesh is connected to that particular bone which is selected. 

At this point the research conducted should help the user understand what they need to do to make each bone match the mesh and they will need to go back and forth to the motion panel to make sure whatever they have edited actually works and has not made the mesh look worse when moving. Another recommendations would be to edit one area at a time and keep testing especially with the orange areas because the user needs to make sure that the other bone that also occupies that space has covered enough of the mesh to for example lift the whole leg instead of leaving half of it still on the ground.

This will take a long time and is a very stressful process and for this project a lot of tutorials and recommendations have been taken on board which got to the stage where the mesh and rig have been linked together nicely with only a slight distortion but it had to be accepted because this process has taken weeks to get to just this particular point and time was running out.

Another thing which the user may find which was mentioned earlier in this post was that the mesh may begin to drag a lot and during this project the troubleshoot of it was only learned towards the end which was very frustrating. Basically when the rig was first created it started with the pelvis but if this was renamed for example to “Hero_ “ every bone will be named similarly. If the user takes a closer look at the bone list they may see that the first bone in the list is probably named in the same way and has a bone towards the feet. This turns out to be wrong and its actually linking the feet to the CAT Parent. It simply needs to be removed so that the head is the first bone on the list and this will stop the drag. Any further dragging occurring after this bone has been removed would need to be adjusted in the Envelopes option.

Another way to get precise links between the mesh and the envelopes would be to select the vert’s option and stat linking individual vert’s of the mesh to the bones, this this can be achieved by selecting the vert’s which are being left behind one body part at a time. For example if one vert is not connected to a bone and is stretched on the left hand middle finger, the user simply needs to highlight the vert and if the user scrolls further down the “Skin” modifier there is a button with a small spanner. If the user selects this a list of bones will come up at the bottom and the user needs to simple select the bone they want to link that particular bone to and select the button “1”. This basically means that the vert will be linked 100% percent to that particular bone which was selected, there is a big catch to this because if the wrong bone is selected the vert may move to another position so some experimentation needs to be done. This method is probably the best once the user has done all they can with the envelopes and only needs to make minor adjustments.

This is basically the stress test and it has taught many lessons for this project and cost the project a lot of time and effort but was partly achieved towards the end. there are some images below showing the hero of this project going through the stress test but because it was such a time consuming task more concentration was used on getting it done rather that taking reference images. but once the stress test was completed on one of the models it was easier to load the previous rig and make some minor adjustments to the bones because the characters are very similar for this project.

Rig!!!

Building a custom rig !!!

For animating purposes and the use of character studio this character will need to have its own custom rig built to match the mesh.

What a rig basically its the bones in which the custom mesh is attached or skinned to so that its easier to animate with the bones instead of having to animates through polygons.

To build a rig the user must first go into CAT objects and drag out a CAT Parent. Once this is done the user can begin building their bones and the starting point would be a pelvis. Once the pelvis has been created it is placed just above the waist of the human mesh.

Now its time to add legs which can easily be done by selecting the add leg button on the rig options. a leg will appear and it needs to dragged and put into place and rule number one when creating the rig is to have it matching as much as possible to the mesh because this will help hugely  when completing a stress test.

Once the leg is in place to make the second one, Add leg should be selected again and the leg in which was edited to math the mesh will be mirrored over and should need none or minor adjustment to match the other leg. Moving on the next step would be to select the pelvis again and this time select add spine. This option creates a spine above the pelvis and can be updated to match the mesh and the amount of bones in the spine can be adjusted in the editing tools in the rig options panel.

Next step would be o creates the arm this can be done by selecting the top bone of the spine and selecting add arm to it and an arm should appear and be attached ready to the spine or shoulders. Then again just some adjustments need to be conducted so the bones match the bones and once one arm is complete by pressing add arm again this arm should be mirrored across to the other side of the body. One thing about the arms is that if the mesh has fingers the bones can be added by inputting the number of bones required on the palm of the hand and not by pressing add bone.

After completing the arms and fingers the final step would be to add the neck and head which isn’t very difficult. If the user was to select the top of the spine or shoulders the user may add another spine with fewer bones and re adjust it to match the head mesh.

This would mean that rig creating is complete. Some advise from personal experience is that make sure the bones match the rig in size and width because it will prove a challenge when skinning has to be applied. This is because certain bones wont attach to the mesh that will mean the movements wont look very smooth and further editing will have to be done.

MudBox

Mudbox!!!

Mudbox proved to be a problem for this project and one good reason would be the inexperience for the program. Since this project has a given deadline there isn’t much time to waste. Because of such a large request and the lack of experience of modeling humans and then animating them sufficient time had to be appointed to animation and the stress test.

The model was exported out of 3ds max with a UVW Unwrap applied to it but there were errors in the model that took time to re model before a better object file could be created. Once the model was exported before it was imported some research was conducted to see if the model could be sculpted and re imported into 3ds max without any problems.

From the findings of research tutorials it is not wise to sculpt a 3ds max model because if it is required for animation or gaming the sculpting will affect the polygon count which will prove more difficult to animate and take even longer to render out.

So the only thing which could be done in Mudbox is to pain the model which was fine because painting in Mudbox is adding detail in a whole new way. After painting the model the layers can easily just be exported as bump maps, which would still keep a low polygon count and have a great effect on the model.

After importing the model into Mudbox it did prove difficult to paint because the model had to be painted in certain layers and the paint panel contained a lot of shades of different colours that made it difficult to choose for example a skin colour. As a summary even painting in Mudbox proved very difficult and a lot of time was wasted trying to learn the techniques and was eventually abandoned because of deadline issues.

The model will have image textures added to it so that the models will have realistic textures added to them which give them a more of a realistic feel to them, although this was not as intended this was the only other good way to colour the models created.