To work most efficiently with bipeds, it is important to follow the general workflow described in this topic.
Before you create a skeleton for a character, have a character skin ready to put the skeleton into.
Create a basic skin shape for your character using any of the 3ds Max modeling tools and surface types. Be sure to place your character's skin in a neutral pose with arms outstretched and legs spaced slightly apart. You may also want to add sufficient detail to your skin's mesh or control points around joints to facilitate deformation during movement.
Character mesh in a neutral pose
Once you have a character mesh, you can create a biped skeleton, or rig, to fit inside. Use Figure mode to set up your biped.
Before you position the skeleton, use controls on the Structure rollout to alter the biped to match your mesh, setting the number of links for the spine, arms, neck, or fingers, or adding props to represent weapons or tools.
When you position the biped inside your mesh, start with the center of mass (COM), which is the parent of all objects in the biped hierarchy. The COM should be positioned in line with the hips of the mesh character. Scale the pelvis so that the legs fit properly in the mesh, and then use Move and Scale on the 3ds Max toolbar to position your biped skeleton.
The following list includes some tips for positioning your skeleton:
You need extra fingers or links only if you are planning on complex hand or foot animation. If your character is wearing gloves or shoes, then you probably only need one finger or toe, with one link.
When you are satisfied with your pose, check the alignment in all viewports to make sure that the skeleton is positioned correctly in the mesh.
Once you have successfully positioned a skeleton inside your character mesh, you are ready to attach the mesh with Physique. For more on this workflow, see Understanding Physique.
A biped model is a two-legged figure: human or animal or imaginary. Each biped is an armature designed for animation, created as a linked hierarchy. The biped skeleton has special properties that make it instantly ready to animate. Like humans, bipeds are especially designed to walk upright, although you can use bipeds to create multi-legged creatures. The joints of the biped skeleton are limited to match those of the human body. The biped skeleton is also specially designed to animate with character studio footsteps, which help solve the common animation problem of locking the feet to the ground.
The geometry of a biped is a linked hierarchy of objects that resembles a human figure. The parent or root object of the biped is its center of mass (COM). This object is displayed as a blue octahedron near the center of the biped's pelvis. Moving the COM repositions the entire biped.
Use the body parameters to change initial biped anatomy. The Body parameters are in the Create Biped rollout that appears in the Create panel when you create a biped.
If your scene is going to contain more than one biped, it's a good idea to give the biped a unique name. By default, the first biped in a scene is called Bip001. Succeeding bipeds have the same name except that the two-digit number is replaced by another number in sequence: 002, 003, 004, and so on.
After creating the default biped, you will often need to change the proportions of the skeleton to fit your model. Use Figure mode to change the biped structure in its rest pose.
One way to adjust a biped’s proportions is by scaling its links. To do so, Figure mode must be active. If you try to scale a biped outside of Figure mode, nothing happens.
Rubber Band mode provides a way to proportion the arm and leg links simultaneously. Rubber Band mode works with the Move transform rather than the Scale transform. When you move an arm or leg with Rubber Band mode turned on, both the link and its child are scaled in a single step.
For greater speed in displaying bipeds, or to make your viewports less cluttered while you edit your scene, Biped lets you turn off the display of some biped elements. These display controls are found in the Motion panel Biped rolloutDisplay group, rather than on the Display panel.
You can quickly and easily delete an entire biped from a scene.
With the Physique component, you can use Biped to animate a deformable skin, usually a mesh object. However, some animations don't require deformation. For example, a knight clad entirely in rigid metal armor doesn't need to deform as skin does. Also, figures seen from a distance don't require the same degree of realism as figures seen close up.
Figure files save all information about a biped's anatomy: links, link positions, twist links, and Figure mode posture, and the scale of geometric elements. Figure (FIG) files have a .fig file name extension.
Footstep animation is a central compositional tool in Biped. Footsteps are biped sub-objects, similar to gizmos in 3ds Max. In viewports, footsteps look like the diagrams often used to illustrate ballroom dancing. Each footstep's position and orientation in the scene controls where the biped steps.
While character studio calculates vertical dynamics and gravity based on its footstep-driven technology, you don’t always want your character strictly under these controls. You might want the character to fly, swim, or to do something improbable in a physical world. For these situations, Biped supports a comprehensive set of freeform animation controls that allow you to take total creative control over your character's pose, movement, and timing.
The topics in this section deal with some special cases of biped animation.
The topics in this section explain how to load, save, and display biped motion.
The Biped user interface is split up into “modes” of operation. You activate these modes by selecting the appropriate button in the Biped rollout on the Motion panel, which is visible when a biped is selected.
The Animation Workbench is a customized version of Track View that you can use for correcting and improving biped animation. It extends the functionality of existing curve editors by giving you different options for visualizing and manipulating curves, and provides filters to perform general rotation, position and other biped-specific operations.
Motion Flow mode lets you graphically arrange motion clips into a network and create and edit transitions between clips for animating one or more bipeds. The networked clips are joined together by transitions.
Motion capture is the practice of getting motion data from live actors performing various actions. The motion data is captured (recorded) from sensors placed at the actors' joints and extremities.
