30 Second Animation: Rigging Mechanical Objects in 3ds Max

in this exercise I'll show how to rig a robot arm of constructed here when you're rigging there's a basic order to things that will make it go a lot easier pivots links IKS and constraints now you may not end up using all of these in a rig every time but on this arm I'm going to see all those things come into play what I've done so far is model all the objects as separate pieces name them all and I've color-coded them so they're easier to find now I'm going to deal with the pivots the big deal first is to get the pins right I want to have each of the pins with its pivot in the center so when I put the I catch a non it goes through the center of the arm correctly I'll press H to select objects by name and select all six pins for small and too large I'll go to the hierarchy tab on the command panel and choose affect pivot only then under alignment I'll Center them to the object and you can see all the pivots move now I'm ready to deal with the pins on the rest of the objects I'll start on the upper arm and still in effect pivot only I'll click on the align tool and align its pivot on to its adjacent pin I'll align this on the x y&z position from pivot to pivot and press ok I'll work my way around the object aligning all the pivots in the right place for the Pistons I'll pick the piston or the piston shaft and align it to its pin correctly here's the other part of the piston and aligning it to its adjacent pin I'll finish this and show it looks like when I'm done I've aligned all the pivots in the right places we can see from the clusters here around the pins that there are multiple objects with their pivots on those pins as part of rigging tests every step along the way here's the test on the upper arm for example I'll pick it hit you for rotate and rotate on the x-axis it rotates in the right place ready to open up I'll do the same with the lower arm selecting it and rotating it on its x-axis to see if it comes out in the right place good now I'm ready to deal with links I want to link upstream from child to parent so I'll begin with the end of the arm I'll select it and click on the select and link button then I'll click and drag from the arm to its pin notice how it highlights in blue when it's ready the pin flashes briefly and I'm ready to go to the next link I'll link the pin at this elbow onto the lower arm now we'll link the lower arm onto its pin and finally the lower pin onto the base and the base onto the round base plate this is pretty good so far but I'll test just to make sure I'll select the base plate and rotate it on the z-axis the arm travels as a static that's how I know it's working all the links are in the right place with no pieces left behind except for the Pistons then I'll pick the lower arm and rotate it and it takes the upper arm and it's pin with it now I'm ready to link the Pistons I'll hide the arms to make this easier to see each piston has a housing and a shaft each one links to its adjacent pin I'll start with the piston housing for the second piston click on select and Link and link it up to its pin then I'll link the pin over to its base the half rounds then I'll pick the shaft of the piston and do the same to its pin clicking and dragging to link on the pin and clicking the pin to link to the base I'll finish the second piston in the same way linking the piston to the pin the pin to the base and since I have it here the base of the piston to the base of the arm then I'll pick the shaft for the piston Link it to its pin and link the pin onto the piston base owl unhide all of my objects and Link the piston base onto the upper arm correctly it flashes briefly and I think I'm ready I'll test one more time I'll select the base hit Eve for rotate and rotate it looks like I forgot to do one link here on the upper piston I'll pick the piston base and select and link it onto the upper arm then I'll pick the other piston base and select and link it to the end one more test you can see as I got caught there why it's so important to test every step of the way now I'll rotate it when I rotate from the base plate the entire arm moves as a static when I rotate the lower arm all of its pieces travel with it the Pistons aren't functional yet we can see this one is disconnecting but everything else is working same with the upper arm click and drag and rotate the piston pieces go with it I'll undo the rotation and I'm ready to put the I catch Eanes on for the I K I'll start with the long lower arm and end up on the upper arm under animation I K solvers I'll choose an H i solver History independent it gives me a dragline saying where is the end of the eye-catching I'll put it on the upper arm the ika goal shows up right here where the pivot is on the elbow here's the test if I grab on the Y z-axis and pull it it takes all the arm components with it and lifts it nicely then I'm free to take the upper arm here and use FK on it to rotate it out as if it was animating we may see this kind of control on a mechanical object and this will work fairly nicely have one control on the base to spin the whole arm one control to elevate the arm and one last control to end up moving the upper arm with the I K in place I'm ready for my constraints I'll hide some objects so we can see this in action four constraints I want to use a look at constraint the reason these Pistons have their separate pins is to avoid a dependency loop I want to have this piston look at the other piston but if I did that with a look at constraint 3ds max would give me an error so here's how it works I'll pick the piston housing and under animation constraints I'll choose a look at constraint it gives me a drag line looking for the target I'll pick the opposing pin it flashes briefly and shows me a line from the look at constraint a sight line here in the look at constraint it says it's looking at pin small and is there a view line length I can leave this alone or added or subtracted if needed I do want to keep the initial offset as you notice without that check it rotated that arm down now we'll repeat this on the other side I'm going to pick the piston shaft and choose animation constraints look at constraint and look at the opposing pin because these are in different places in terms of their dependencies I don't get a loop again I'll scroll down and check keep initial offset okay here's the test I'll unhide everything I'll select the ika chain at the end of the arm and I'll pull it up okay well nothing on the Pistons yet but everything's still moving intact if I pick the upper arm and rotate it the pistons opened up correctly now obviously I can pull it out and break the piston but I would clip on the arm anyway but it's working the piston halves are looking at each other everything is chained together and opening this up looks like a functioning hydraulic piston I'll finish the look at constraints on the lower piston I'll pick the piston housing and choose animation constraints look at constraint looking at the opposing pin I'll scroll down check keep initial offset and move to the shaft here's the look at constraint looking at the opposing pin and checking keep initial offset okay last test I'm going to pick the iocai goal and I may actually want to put a controller on this to make it easier to manipulate there's the goal and as I pull it up the lower piston elongates then as I rotate the upper arm out the upper piston works as well the rig is ready the last thing I do in a rig is add controllers I really never want to pick a mesh and animate it or pick a pick and Heike and animate it I'd like to have my controls distilled down here's how I'll make this work I'm going to hold ctrl and right click and pick circle I'll take take a circle and I'll make it viewable enabled in the viewport as a solid but not renderable for this circle I'll align it on to that end pin aligning from pivot to pivot on XY & z then I'll take the eye a chain and select and Link it over to my circle the link is done now I have a controller here's the last part I'll take my controller my circle and link it back to my base plate as an alternate I could make another controller down here on the base plate instead of linking straight to the base plate once more I'll test I'll select the base and I'll rotate it everything travels with it as a static object if I pick the controller which now allows me to freeze all the rest of the components and I rotate the controller nothing happens if I move the controller the arm opens up I've got a mix of control and mesh animation here for this I'm really ok with it you may want to distill this down to finer levels of control and be able to freeze the entire mesh this will work for now I've animated the arm so you can see how this all works as I scrub on the timeline the arm rotates opens up and the end swings out

Channel: DigitalSTEAMWorkshop

Views: 114,395

Keywords: Autodesk 3ds Max (Software)

Id: t82pNz7hLqw

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 25 2013