Biped Pose to Pose Animation - 3DS Max

hi in this video demonstration we're going to take a look at animating post pose using the biped skeletal system bond system while I kind of believe that the newer cat rigging system is kind of superior in almost every way you may still run into places where you're going to need to use the old standard which is our biped rigging system a lot of studios that may have older versions of the software or a little bit stuck in their ways or just have found you know things work out better for them when they're using biped etc motion capture is a little bit easier with with the biped and some other things that may end up pushing you towards the biped system now creating a biped skeletal structure just as the name suggests is for bipedal characters only that does not mean you can't really force fit the biped structure into a quadruped ever going to get more than two legs four limbs total so in in a lot of ways building rigs in cat is quite superior to this but if your character happens to be a two-legged creature that needs to move and act like a human being then this this is a perfectly acceptable alternative so where we find the biped system is if we go to our create tab all the way over to our systems as it is a biped system and you'll find the biped here you can also find it of course in your create tab and all the way down to systems and there's your pipe it there as well so we're going to go ahead and click that biped there and we're going to kind of drag out click and drag to create a biped skeleton okay you're going to manipulate this skeleton like most things in rigging on the movement tab first things first before we get going too far a lot of times this is going to be necessary to really kind of take a look at your size options and your units scale so we're gonna kind of jump up here to to customize and down to units setup here real quick if you know you're working in the United States chances are you're still using the United States standard feet with inches and all that terrible terrible stuff we've also got this large button at the top it says system unit scale and just to make sure we're all on the right page here I want you to click that button and make sure that one unit is equal to an inch in this case if we were real smart we'd be using the metric system and we could do it towards millimeters or centimeters etc but we'll stick with what we know here in our sadly olden United States stuck in our ways methods one unit equals one-inch go ahead and say ok and then we'll switch to the US standards feet and I'm not chose just decimal inches it's a little easier to calculate than fractions and then we can say okay just to make sure that our rigs are about the same size is it will kind of make a big difference here in the future granted you're going to be dragging yours out to the scale of your character whatever size you made your character so sometimes that won't matter but just in order to keep us on the same page we'll make sure that that's where we're set at here then we're going to jump to the motion tab so I've got just the pelvis one ball and selected from our biped rig and we move over to the motion tab where we'll find most of our biped settings the first things first is much like we're going to take a look at the biped rollout here and much like cat there is a settings mode and an animation mode and in order to turn on the ability to adjust this biped rig and maybe give our character more than one little stubby finger right in the middle of his hand make it look like he's doing nasty things all over here we need to go into the setup mode and the setup mode in by that is called figure mode so you're going to find it looks like this little stick figure guy here with a black dot right in his head we click to turn that on before we adjust size position rotation and all that good stuff in order to size it to our character sadly the biped mode does not work quite like cats so we can't make custom bone shapes to fit in our characters perfectly but if we jumped out of the structure we do have some kind roll over this thing first is a rollout for body type we've got skeleton which is what I think most of us end up using but you can also kind of get a different shape for male/female or kind of a classic skeletal structure there we'll stick with skeleton for for right now you have control over the amount of links for each body part neck links we'll leave it one spine links probably don't usually need more than about three that's usually what I start with and you know case I've got a very stretchy bendy character it's no no need for all kinds of extra bones taking up space in more calculation leg links will leave tailings we're not going to give this guy tail for right now he doesn't have a pony tail so we'll leave those at zero let's go ahead and give this poor guy five fingers however and just like us regular human being folk we've got three joints in our fingers so three finger links on each finger bone will give us you know nice structure for the hands and toes let's leave the toes at one but only one toe link we're going to make it so this guy that maybe it's looking like he's got some shoes on rather than anything else the next really important one you've got some props that you can turn on if your character is holding or or moving with something in his arms you've got the ability to slide where the ankles attach which is makes things a little strange but you can move them around just in case you did want to force fit this poor character into let's say a quadruped pad or something like that you've got a little bit of adjustment there let's go down into the end of the height and since we've set it four feet in decimal inches we can just hit six here and we'll make it us you know just a standard six foot character you've got the ability to you get a few other things down here things for it like knuckles and and to triangulate the neck and all that good stuff but we're not going to worry about any of those other things from this point let's zoom in on his feet we are kind of going to want to scale this toe bone up because right now it looks like he's got one little tiny tail we want to make it look a little bit more like shoes so if we kind of come up here and open up the tracks election and select one of our toe bones here well we've got the option to do this symmetrical guy here and then we can get our scale and bear with me here because the biped is a little strange and sometimes thinking you're going to scale them a little bit wider in the extra x-axis is going to get them to go in the exact opposite direction with five hit so you've got to have a little bit of an open mindset as you work with scaling biped characters and you know the x axis is now going to scale our art our toes out whereas the z axis will give them a wider berth everything's kind of just dead wrong with our biped system here for some reason but we work with what we've got and that'll work for us again that symmetry mode will help you kind of get both of them going at the same time you can always copy and paste one side and the other as you setup a biped rig but hopefully you're going to be using cat most of the time now as it is a little bit more of a convenient system here once we've got our biped setup as we do we're not going to make any other changes here anymore but but know that in the future you know you might need to seriously beef up your skeleton depending on what kind of character you're trying to force this into a standard human skeleton doesn't fit into a short stubby late cartoon character real well unless you're really going to go through and scale all the bones to size or as close to size as we can get the biped again unlike our cat system where we can kind of customize the bone shapes to fit like a glove we've got to do the best we can with buy pit but once we are done we have to remember to turn off that figure mode make sure that it is untold' so it will not show up blue there for us in order to do any of our animation work here once that's done we're going to kind of minimize our track selection here I'm going to open up the copy/paste rollout as well as our key info rollout and I'm actually going to kind of slide these two together here because those are going to be what we're going to be working in back and forth one thing about the buy ped is you want to set keys and everything you'll still work with our Auto key down here but never use the set key button because you're going to get some some rather strange results sometimes and some rather off-the-wall and bad things can happen if you just use this key because our biped keying info gives us several different kinds of keys that we can set that work a little bit better with bipedal movements for your hands and legs and feet and all that kind of good stuff well in order to create our movement let's do kind of a simple fun run cycle here we're going to need to create poses a lot like we did in cat where we're going to create a pose and then animate between the two extremes we're going to do something similar here before we get going we have to create a collection and that's this little sunshine button down here we'll want to hit that and it will create a brand new collection that we can then rename we can name our run or something along those lines then we're going to want to switch over from posture mode to pose mode which is going to save the entire skeleton rather than just parts of that skeleton if you wanted to resize your skeleton on one side and then kind of copy that side over to the other side then you'll stick with posture and you'll paste opposite over while you're in setup mode or figure mode but we're going to do pose mode here and now we have to pose our character for some some extremes that we might show a run cycle as always please use reference even if it's just a mirror that you run in place in front of or videotape yourself cameras are everywhere now we've got them all in our cell phone so this is a good way of getting some reference even if it's in referenced files that you may have from books or classes that you take and I know I've made a few for for students of my own here that will do plotting out of you know different run cycles in our traditional animation style just another reason that learning how to draw and really knowing where animation kind of came from and how the traditional animators truly work comes in real handy here so please use reference it is wise and it will make your run cycles and walk cycles and dancing and moving in any kind of motion that much better here now that I've said that we're going to kind of just wing it for the purposes of our demonstration so our run cycle may not turn out quite as nice as this little guy without running here but it will get you the tools learned so that you can do this on your own later just remember important use reference really take those observational skills to the next level and look at how things move and act and behave in the real world that being said let's do the best we can for demonstration purposes here and I'm going to kind of give our guy a different maybe he's uh he's in full stride here ah some kind of open this up we'll turn off our grid there so we can see what we're doing and maybe pull up there the deal will kind of take his hand get my move tool and we'll put up green laid back so we'll put the green arm forward and then blue arm back there as well we may double click there or click more than one bone here for that and we'll turn him a little bit as well as maybe adjust some other things as we go again this may be a little bit stiff of a movement for right now but I'd say that is worth saving a pose I like to turn my save frames on which mine are already on almost always work with my safe frames there if I can and I like to kind of zoom in on this because what we're going to do is use the snap shot from our viewport here you've got several options underneath our copied poses here one is capture snapshot from the viewport let's capture snapshot automatically and the other one is no snapshot whatsoever but this is really nice because when I go ahead and I copy the pose it's going to give me a little thumbnail here of what this post looks like so that if I am not too bright and don't name my poses and we can call this a full stride or something along those lines and that description plus this little thumbnail here it's going to tell me exactly what pose I'm about to load in as well so now we've got that in our copied poses here we can load them in by using the paste poses and we've got paste and paste opposite so that's pretty good in order to get back to our just kind of standard let's go ahead and hit the figure mode button and that kind of resets them and then when we turn it back off we've still got our pose here that I can paste in and we didn't lose anything there so again back let's click figure mode then unclick figure mode so we're back in animation mode and let's get the next extreme in line here if you want to you can all text to make that pelvis bone invisible because on the inside here we've got this bit bold one bone our actual biped bone it's the center of gravity and they like to hide it inside this thing which makes it incredibly difficult to kind of grab hold of sometimes but that's alright we're going to grab this guy and we're going to bring down especially if I kind of turn my grid back on here's our ground layer I want to bring him down a little ways like he's made contact with the ground here we know he's going to make contact with the blue foot since it was in front for our walk cycle there so I'll bring him up and maybe even over a little bit so that it's directly underneath his Center gravity and then we'll bring his green leg kind of like it's getting ready to pass in that passing position or breakdown position and there we are and then we'll do kind of a similar thing here we'll bend his his whole body down a little bit there farther really means the faster he's running right and then his arms we'll just rotate a little bit here should be fairly well at his side but we never want anything to be perfectly symmetrical here so we'll leave those a little bit out there and then maybe his head goes down and that's a good place to start anyway you might want to rotate his hips a little bit or even make you know some room for that impact like actually he'd be going the other way right so as the impact is pushing that side up just a little bit and then we'll compensate by bringing his foot back to the ground here okay that's at least a eighth place to start it's probably not the best thing in the world here but this guy's still a little back so his arms a little bit forward here and vice-versa and we'll bend these as we need to even worry about things like fingers and all that good stuff as we continue on that being said let's kind of give him into the same position here in my safe frames by alt W blow that up a little bit bigger and I'm going to copy another pose let's pose I'll say would be our passing position or breakdown shot alright now that we've got two different poses full stride and passing position we're set to really kind of start animating so a walk cycle if we're going to do a run cycle here it's going to be a little faster than a walk cycle let's say on average twice as quick at least as a walk cycle and if we do our walk cycles on let's say March time which is about 12 5 12 frames per step we can cut that down a half to maybe about 6 to 8 frames for a run cycle so now that we've got our two positions I'm going to go ahead and put him back in full stride mode by coming down to this little copy pose drop down selecting full stride mode and then the two page choices here I've got paste pose to put him back in there I'm going to turn my auto key on now because we're about to start animating but remember don't ever set a key using the key button down here when working with your biped instead you'll want to use the keys inside the key info and I want to select all the bones in my biped so that I select a key for every single one of them in this case and we'll open up our lips our copy/paste and our keyframe info and we'll set the key using this little red button here so he's got a good place to start and then let's say if we want to up in the air I would say be a little slower coming down and then he'll launch off from the ground a little bit so let's uh let's give them eight key frames before the next pose is set in here so we move our slider over to eight we switch from full stride to passing position and we will paste the pose in and you'll see that we are already animating between the two here then he'll launch up a little bit quicker and let's say maybe by frame fourteen six this time instead of eight we can go ahead and switch back to the full stride pose only this time we can use the other paste option here which is paste pose opposite so you've only ever got to create extremes for one side of the body luckily it'll do the hard work for us and swap those positions and we're off to a start I won't say a great start but we're off to a start here we go six and we're going to go over one two three four five six seven eight if you're good at math you probably know that between 14 and 22 that's eight frames and we're going to go back to our passing position and paste opposite there as well okay so we've got almost the full walk cycle or the full run cycle I should say we just need to bring it back home so that it starts over again at the same key here as our first one so one two three four five six about to front twenty eight I'm just going to kind of hold down shift and copy that keyframe by dragging it over to 28 at this point I can turn my auto key off for now and come down to my time configuration button here let's just truncate shorten our animation timeline from a hundred frames to exactly that twenty-eight so that when we hit the play button now we've got this character and he is in full stride motion here now we'll finish the the keyframes for all this stuff but then just to get rid of that little extra bit of a hitch since this is where he's going to be starting here I'll probably truncate my animation one more down so that this is where it ends and then he starts with only one frame in there because that'll give you a little hitch in your step if you're going to do a cycle here by making uh making this guy repeat twice but for now we want that keyframe there so we know where to set all of our last ones and we can kind of continue on we've done our hour extremes are opposed to pose animation stuff here now it's just a matter of adjustments so I'll turn my auto key back on and we will do exactly that I'm going to come to my pelvis here and I want to alt X the wave sign they like to call it we want to make sure that this guy in his full stride mode here right both legs are off the ground he needs to be at his highest point so depending on how extreme we want that with just that bit a one button the biped bone we want to raise it up a little bit and then as he comes down his foot planted here great and then as he goes back up I can actually just copy since I've only got the biped bone that center of gravity selected it's kind of copied over to raise him and that's going to give us quite the nice stride there and we'll do the same thing for that final one at 28 and it might be a little extreme but I like extreme exaggeration and animation it's a little bit easy to accept and that makes him I'll just immediately look quite a bit better there now one of the biggest complaints about biped is that it doesn't work with our standard tangents so getting the the easing and the slow and slow out principle to work is not very simple on this but it is present regardless we just have to change how our biped works and down here you'll find another I'm gonna go ahead and raise this up just so that we can see it a little easier above our key info the quaternion and euler if we open this guy up you'll default on this this court in Yin I'm sure I'm pronouncing that completely incorrect but that's alright so let's select all the bones in our body once again and if we switch this to Euler we will have access to some of those easing tools we want to make sure that all that's over there so what is on you Euler you can minimize that again and we can go up to the biped apps which we've got our mixer in our workbench and our curve editor from the biped is going to be called the workbench here at this point we can actually take a hold of that biped bone and take a look at some of these curves now we've got a choice up here with the drop-down rotation curve etc we want the position curve in this case and there we are there's our wave sign that we've been talking about and all of the High Point Keys frame 0 14 and 28 there we can actually use our tangents now and those should all be set maybe kind of two slow tangents whereas the bottom ones we can set immediately to those fast tangents and get that bouncing ball kind of spring a look to them you can also select all of these guys and set tangents to auto and then you'll have full control over these tangent handles holding down shift will allow you to select each side individually and you can kind of carve and curve these up to your liking don't select shift and both the handles will kind of adjust themselves at that point and we can kind of you know if I do hold on shift we can kind of get that arcing motion there a little bit better we can also just kind of set it to slow for right now or set it to fast just like our bouncing ball and that will give gravity a little bit more of that realistic feel so that he dropped slower and takes off faster and that helps him quite a bit he's still kind of rising an awful lot there but that's okay okay we'll go ahead and exit out of that for right now if I did want to adjust full well grab that auto key and maybe I don't want them rising so far so I can kind of pull him back down and then move over and copy here and here as well and that'll get them to rise without quite so much incredible hulk jump style there but we still get that rise and fall all right now it's all a matter of Ken off setting some keys to make him look a little bit less stiff and a little bit less robotic I'll go ahead and leave Auto key on I was turn that off just in case but maybe here just for his spine maybe we push that off one frame so that as he hits his spine continues maybe down and maybe for the whole spine we do the same thing all the way through and even so now his whole spine is moving just to framed after the rest of his run cycle you get a little hitch there because I move that back we can always set a key here and then copy it to frame zero by selecting holding it down shift ah it did work okay good and that should hopefully fix up a little bit of that so there now I've got a little bit more of a I believe remote movement again we would three take some serious time to adjust a lot of this stuff and we can do something similar for its head maybe its head takes one keyframe longer but only in these two positions and get these guys moving independently of each other because again we don't want the spine looks terrible let's go ahead and click that spine let me readjust here I think I moved it over two keyframes yeah and let's just put that back for right now there whoops don't need to copy down and we'll move this back there and we'll have his spine not worry about that extra beginning only from the middle points a little bit of a jump or a hitch there but we'll fix that as we go at this point we can start looking at things like his actual contact point rather than his passing position here which is where we have at eight he's fully contacted with the ground but probably more along the lines of maybe three or three frames earlier we want a foot to make full contact here our contact position with that heel and then we would do that again see here's where our green green leg one two three back and maybe we'll pull him all the way down as well so he's stretching to reach that ground one of the things you can do here is instead of just the regular set key you've got some other choices here we've got a set planted key which will help you plant that foot a little easier and then same one two three four our our green light we can set a planted key within any of the rest of them you know maybe here where we want to start bending his foot to get it a little bit flatter and pull it back up we might want to go with the sliding key so that foot isn't stuck in place but is actually sliding across the ground gives us a little bit more control over those things and then maybe here we can also set that that's sliding key and it will try and keep his foot on the ground rather than what you saw a moment ago it kind of jumps back up and down plop we don't want that so we're going to kind of set sliding keys between here there we have it and then for the green foot as well next door here harry's planted here we want to rotate his foot straight and then bring it back up and set that sliding key so that so that then you can slaps his foot down there and then we'll set another sliding key here so that that pop-up doesn't happen in the center there and now our feet are looking pretty good and we're actually not doing too terrible just to make double sure that I don't have any extra frames select all of him get myself an extra okay good and then he freezes good all right so twenty eight frames looks like what our full cycles be here and you can always speed this up you can you can scale these in a little bit here if we select all of the the range you can scale these together a bit more if you want them to pick up speed or scale them out now with our nice little scale slider down here together but there you have it kind of a good quick pose to pose a run cycle and yeah he's I told you it wasn't going to be perfect but it's going to get the idea across as to how to animate post pose using biped we've got some some promising tools some good tools to use either way here even though I still strongly recommend you get best with the cat system as it's a little bit more diverse especially since we like cartoons and creatures quite a bit but hey there you have it

Channel: Clint DiClementi

Views: 175,532

Keywords: Autodesk 3ds Max (Software), Animation (Professional Field), Tutorial, How To, Animation, 3D, 3D Modeling (Profession), Biped, Animated, Animator

Id: lwAceZeG8oQ

Length: 31min 47sec (1907 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 23 2014