Biped Footsteps in 3ds Max

all right so uh we've been using the cat animation system for the last two assignments uh but i'm gonna go ahead and switch this to something called biped so biped's one of the original animation systems for characters uh it does a lot of really cool things still it's updated generally every single time maxes so i kind of want to go over how biped works and that way for the rest of semester you can decide which one you're going to want to use okay so where we're going to be looking for this is over here in the um over in your create menu here so we're on create menu and then i'm clicking on systems and then i clicked on biped so when you click on biped you're going to see a bunch of different options here and i don't worry about these options we can adjust them in just a second so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to click and drag out a little biped man and then of course you're going to want to click to like your modify panel or or something else to get off that biped creation tool now if you notice on the modify panel i can't change anything so this is very different than how cat works where everything was on the modify panel but if i go over to my motion panel i now have a whole lot of options available to me that aren't ever there for cats so let's kind of look at these a little bit if i need to make adjustments to my biped system i'm going to select figure mode and inside of figure mode i can go back and adjust that so maybe in fingers i don't want to have four fingers increase the number of splines and all that stuff right so pretty simple to do there and then you can get out of figure mode so the one thing that i wanted to show you in here was our animation tools for biped you don't have to use animation layers like you did in uh like you did with cat this one's pretty pretty easy to do uh for biped you just use auto key and start animating however when you're animating in biped there's a couple different things you have to remember in that you can't move him so like if i select this and try to move it nothing happens so if you actually want to give him vertical or horizontal movement you have to use these guys right here body horizontal and body verticals if i click body horizontal i can then slide the body where i want it to be and the same with vertical so this is how you kind of do those walking animations etc etc etc let me go ahead and put him back on the ground so okay so the main thing i want to show you guys was called oh this is also how you rotate them okay so the main thing i want to show you is called footstep footstep mode is incredible okay and this is what your next assignment is going to be doing is creating a whole footstep simulation and then we're going to go over generating a character with autodesk's character generator building that character putting a biped rig in that character and then doing an obstacle course with that character so this is just a real simple footstep animation before we move into the more complicated obstacle course animation so if i click on footstep mode you're gonna see it changes okay now and then we have a couple of different options over here namely we have walk run jump those are important and then we have create footsteps at current frame then we have create multiple footsteps so i want you what i want you to do is click on create multiple footsteps number of footsteps i'm going to do six okay so six is my number of footsteps you can pick if you want to start left or start right it'll automatically alternate what do you want your stride length to be all that stuff okay so a lot of stuff in here i'm gonna go ahead and click ok so it auto generates footsteps for me and you're going well okay what do i do with that so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to click create keys for inactive footsteps so when i do that and all of a sudden animate my character walks my character now has key frames controlling it like if i click on the feet let me get out of footstep mode so i click on the feet you can see i actually have keyframes these keyframes i can then edit so i can go through and edit all this and this is what's going to be required of you for your obstacle course is to really do a lot of um a lot of animations in here right so you can see now he has footsteps i'm allowed to move him down or up right i don't have keyframe on though so it's not going to change anything okay so so i've got five footsteps you're probably going well that's great but what if i need to add more footsteps what if i for instance have a box that i need him to climb up on right so that's pretty easy so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back to the biped and then i'm going to go back to my animation click on footsteps and then i have a pinned create footsteps append so you can see that the last one that it ended on was five so now when i click six seven eight and nine okay so before i do anything i'm gonna hit q and i'm gonna get out of footstep mode so what i can do i'm going to add a footsie mode but hit cue so i'm not putting them down anymore now i can actually slide them around to where i want them so i know that i want it to be i want them to step up here okay there we go and then once he steps up we'll have them stop at the edge now keep in mind that it's going to follow these footsteps to the letter so if i for instance just an example take this guy and put it way over there i'm going to click create keys for inactive footsteps i'm going to hit play right so you can see how that works it can get you know obviously pretty terrible so i'm going to go and move that back into place okay now what's really cool is the footsteps going to update in real time i don't have to wait for it it is in real time that it updated right now this is where your keyframes are going to come into place you can see how he's throwing himself up there is fairly awkward so once you got out of key step mode i could start selecting these guys and looking at where these where these keys are for instance like maybe i don't want that to be swinging all the way over there so you know i can start looking at how i'm going to adjust it what my options actually are so you can see there's one so back into auto key mode so he's coming over but that one i need to fix as well so you can see i'm coming in there and i'm fixing that key and i think i'm going to kill these ones so let's see what it does much better right so you're going in there and you're going to edit all of these keys to make them work and i may need another key frame in here also but i can also just simply grab his foot okay so you can see i changed my filter to bone so that way i can actually come in here and and figure out so at that frame it's right there so what is this frame doing i'm just gonna kill that frame and i'm going to make an adjustment so here i'm going to rotate it that way he's like really kind of stepping off of it and then once we're here raise it up right so you can see it requires quite a bit out of you to make that work okay so the footsteps are going to get you 80 of the way there for instance let me come over and look at this foot right here so we see this guy just kind of doing this weird broken rotation so i can go in here and fix it right so you're gonna go fix it manually until you get the results you want so that's like a quick rundown of the footstep control system but let's kind of look at a couple of other things that it does so i'm going to go back to footstep mode and i'm going to click on so where's this guy in right there so i'm going to click i'm going to switch this to run and i'm going to tell it to um i don't know if they've made it so it'll actually append or not but we're going to find out so i'm going to try to pin 16 frames 8 9 10 yeah i did okay sweet now this is going off of his height right so i'm going to go ahead and slide these back down and then i'm going to create keys hit play and he starts doing his little job right so it looks like i create multiple footsteps we'll go ahead and append to the end of a uh into a set of keys now i wouldn't do that before so it's pretty exciting that is now doing that okay so and if you notice it also adds to my timeline automatically now the run animation is really bad there are an animation they just kind of use to give you a a stride length that you would go in and really adjust because it kind of does like a little hop thing like okay so what your assignment is i want you to go ahead and create a simple walk cycle or a simple walk with using biped and footsteps and then i want you to go through and have it step up on a box and step off a box so you're gonna need to have a walk step up on a box step off a box and you're gonna have to fix those key frames that it's gonna break because a couple of them will get messed up now watch this what's really cool is if i rotate this he will automatically rotate with them and i can go in and like just grab a huge chunk of them let me switch to square and rotate them right and it all out updates in real time so now let's see how he does that so he actually follows it okay so for your assignment again just you're going to create a footstep based animation using biped and have it walk up step up onto a box and step off of the box and you can go ahead and make this about as long as you want it to be you're going to want to at least be uh at least be 120 frames more than likely just so you really have a good understanding of footprints and how they work okay good luck

Channel: Michael Brown

Views: 11,112

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Id: zJz2HtPUolk

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021