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.