CAT Motion Layer Tools in 3DS Max

hi in this video demonstration we're going to take a look at a more animation with the cat rigging system here so we're gonna take a look at cat motion and how we can get our 3d characters moving as it pertains to walking running sneaking stuff like that the typical walk cycle animation very quickly with some procedural techniques that are built into the cat system first things first we're just go ahead and take our select our our rig node here and go over to the motion tab now this is a great way to test your rigs make sure that the skin is following the bones and all that stuff really quickly but it's also it's also great and very useful for doing some finished animation when they are talking about character walks and this works with characters with two legs four legs eight legs 112 legs all the same so all this stuff is procedural so it's all built in and we can just kind of get started and get our characters moving about as fast as possible here just like anything we're gonna need to come over to our motion tab here and we need to be able to get out of setup mode and turn on animation mode in order to do that we need to add a layer we're gonna come down here to the button that says ABS it's a little green sphere over a blank page here and we're gonna click and hold we've got four different types of layers the first one is an absolute layer for most of our animation that's probably what we're going to use the second two are adjustment layers and we'll get to those here in just a little bit and the very last one with this little green stick figure guy running here is our cat motion layer so we're gonna go ahead and select that one first off and it'll add a cat motion layer here to our layers now we can now that we've got a layer we can go ahead and hit this red button up here that changes us from setup mode to animation mode and you'll see your character immediately change position if we go ahead and hit the play down here on our playhead you can see that your character is already walking albeit very zombie esque and not a good walk cycle but he's moving right off the bed this is fully refundable however so we're gonna kind of come in here and try to clean him up a little bit and and get him walking a little bit less like Frankenstein a little bit more like God and also I'm determined looking male scrawny cartoon character here you'll notice that once you've added a cat layer a new button appears and it's this little guy that looks like a paw print here this nice big green button and that's our cat motion editor go ahead and click that button to say okay and it'll bring up your cat motion editor your dialog box for all of these settings right off the bat it puts you at the cat motion preset so we do have some presets in here we'll take a look at those a little bit later but for right now let's take a look at what all these settings actually do for us the next one down is our Global's and this is our pacing our timing for this walk cycle and you'll notice I could kind of move him over to the side here so we can see our thing here and I go ahead play and we can adjust this stuff in real time here we've got our start and our stop time I'm going to go ahead and reduce the end time to 24 we're going to do a March time 24 frame walk cycle here just to get us going and what that's going to do is give us you know key frames between frames 0 and 24 just for safety's sake here I'm gonna actually change the timeline down here as well by coming down to my time configuration button in here in the bottom right corner and we're gonna change the end time there to 24 while we work on this sucker and if we go ahead hit play it'll just loop between frames 0 and 24 and that way we're not looking at any extra keyframes for no good reason the next setting down is going to be our stride parameters and we've got a max step time I'll probably end up matching this to 24 since we do want March time know that in the future if you want your character to walk slower you can raise this but you're also gonna need more keyframes so 24 ain't gonna do it if you want a nice super slow let's say sneak cycle or something like that you can also get your character to walk faster and we can bump this up to 12 here maybe get something closer to our run cycle we'll go ahead and put that right back to matching so between frames 0 & 1 for we have our maximum step one with their left and one with the right underneath there is our stride length and this works with our next step time to determine how quickly our character is walking if I reduce this to something crazy like 40 you'll see our character immediately starts giving these little baby steps kind of tiptoe stuff if I increase this maybe 250 you'll see that our stride is even too long for our characters legs so he starts he starts going super Frankenstein here and he's stretched out to the end what we default with is a hundred and sixty that's looking okay maybe 120 and this way you can start to define and there our legs are bending a little bit nicer maybe we'll leave it at about 120 you've also got control you won't be able to change the velocity because that's dependent on these two here but you do have control over direction if I want my character and start doing a backward walk I can 180 degrees in the other direction and he'll start walking backwards if I will do a 90 degrees he'll start sidestepping so this is kind of a very super cool quick way of getting different walk siding especially for those of us working in the video game industry and stuff like that we can kind of get all of our sidestep walk cycles our dodge walk cycles our strength wieck's walk cycles etc all really quickly with these cool you might also be able to give your character a little hitch in a step just by doing a little bit of a direction change so he'll get you know maybe a little limp in there something we'll go ahead and put this back to zero to keep going you've also got the gradient value now if I put this 90 our character's gonna start walking up the side of a building 33 he'll start walking uphill so you can't change that as well as animate these values so that he starts gradually walking like spider-man up the side of a building etc the rest of our demonstration will just go ahead put that back to zero as well we've got some other options over here in the walk mode for right now we're gonna do walk on spot because our cyclist playing for us right there but know that we can do walk on line which will get our character walking forward as well as walk on a path node which we'll take a little look at a little bit later on here so let's just leave that on Splatt for now the next one down is our living phases and this is which direction your legs are going left leg versus the right leg if they're set apart exactly opposite of each other they will be spread apart exactly opposite of each other if we push them all together our character begins hopping with both legs moving at the exact same time so probably not the best of ideas for this right now we'll go ahead and put this back to negative 0.25 there and you know when we get all the way to the end you'll notice it's kind of a cycle so this and this are the same if we want them to be extremely different we can go ahead and put them at exactly halfway between two of these points on either end of the spectrum is going to be the other so negative 0.25 and then 0.25 is our default and that's working just fine for a bipedal walk cycle we can do something similar with the arms only they're set pretty much exactly the opposite of the legs right now we can give our character maybe a little bit more character if we maybe offset these just a little bit different and then get our arms moving at a slightly different rate than our legs that might give him some more personality in his walk you know sometimes you'll want to walk in perfectly other times you'll want him to have almost that kind of he's favoring one side over the other and gives him a little bit more of that Limpy look as well we'll go and put these back though 25 whoops point two five and a negative 0.25 to get him going opposite we'll come back for some of these other ones these footprints here later on once we start walking on pads and stuff like that from here we've got this walk cycle and he is doing some pretty funky stuff up here in his chest and his pelvis in his head he's wiggling and twisting and turning and rolling all over the place the pelvis group chest group and head group are going to be where we can adjust this stuff so we can click on a little plus sign to open this pelvis group up and then we'll click on a little plus sign next to pelvis and we'll see all of the customizable traits that we can give this guy first off is our twist and this is gonna be you know if I go ahead and raise this up let's say the scale here will go 500% you'll see his pelvis twist in a completely unrealistic and psychotic manner here you ever want to go back to the default you've got this reset button here and just go ahead and reset it in fact most of the time I don't go up depending on what kind of character whether or not he is limping or strutting or doing something terrible with his back in there that you know swinging from side to side that we want to get some character out of this may be a very feminine character wearing a tight skirt that you know she can't swing her hips but you can't spread her legs kind of thing if we come down here into the scale we can kind of reduce it by 50% or by 25% etc you know one of the confusing things that first timers run into is the best scale immediately resets back to zero but the changes to our curve here remain the same so I always remember that reset buttons there for you and if you want to reduce it only by about 75% you can do that as well and then keep kind of come back and testing different values well go ahead and reduce that twist by about half just so our pelvis remains mostly straight you can also select these guys by individual points on this curve here right now I've got the first and last because this is in the cycle point on this curve selected but I can select each individual one and we can do some adjustments based on you know if we do want them to seriously hitch in the middle to one side we can go ahead and do that we don't so let's kind of go back to our negative five there and we can adjust all of these especially the curves and all that good stuff our tangents are all built in here as well let's go to the roll next and we're gonna we're gonna kind of reduce that by about 50% there as well so that he's not twisting his hips it's kind of a male manly character here so we don't need him swinging his hips side to side as much you've got other controls in here that may come into play later on right now our picture set to zero that we've also got lift that's how how much you want his center of gravity to pick up as he is walking fine if I reduce this pretty much to zero he stays very planar doesn't go up and down a whole lock it shut you know he starts to glide a little bit more if I go ahead and raise this to you let's say and ridiculous number like 500% and suddenly he starts skipping so he's got a very high up and down range in that case we may go ahead and we'll leave him as is maybe even raise it up a little bit to 150 if we want to give him kind of a nice manly stomping walk versus versus anything a little bit less we can always kind of hit that reset button and only go slightly like 25% something along those lines let's go down to our weight shift and this is if I if I rotate our view here how well he favors one leg when he puts his foot down he's gonna it's gonna move his whole center of gravity over that leg to brace for it I think right now you know he's going back and forth a little bit maybe we could reduce it to about 75 get a little bit less but you know it's not too bad we kind of want him to shift over his weight his legs are spread a little far apart because that's how we modeled this character but we can always adjust those later using another layer in cat to really get this working fine for us we might come back to this we've also got a position offset if you see that your character is stretching and snapping a little bit here in the interim we can offset this pelvis maybe by like a negative 2 so that he keeps a little lower to the ground so that he doesn't completely stretch out there negative 5 keeps his leg bent almost all the time negative 4 gives us a little bit negative 3 he starts snacking a little bit there so we just kind of try and find a happy medium so that that knees not snapping and that leg never extends completely out we can always come back and revisit this as well all right down into the leg group you've got everything from new angles to twists and cross swings and stuff like that we've also got control over things like our foot platform down here under the legs where we can adjust how high the foot things like our lifts if I want him to lift his leg a little higher as he walks more of a childish or a cartoony walk we can increase these values as well and then it starts stomping a little bit more than anything else again we got that reset button so we can always get back to normal value and then try again good here we go we've got some pitch we can adjust how much that that foot pad bends as he walks we might be able to go ahead and let's go extreme here just to seriously see what we can do that's uh it's really adjusting how much is foot tilts as he steps again 500% is ridiculous 0% means he's kind of stomping again like Frankenstein without ever bending his foot and then somewhere in there around 200 we can get a little bit more of a foot bend and we can start adjust and get that really rounded out rolling step rather than anything like pick up foot down Frankensteinian again all these things go ahead and play with as you will if you want your foot to twist a little bit or roll side to side as he walks all of these things are perfectly customizable go ahead and minimize these guys here in the pelvis group and let's go down to the chest group where we've got control over his chest and arms again he's kind of twisting quite a bit here so I'm gonna go ahead and reduce maybe down to 50% on that twist for the chest and the roll as well so maybe he stops with the shoulder swing quite so much we've also got the ability for lift here as well and if I want him to hold his chest a little bit straighter we can reduce that there we go we've also got the weight shift and some position rotations and position and rotation offsets here if let's say I want him a little bit more leaning forward when he walks we can kind of play around with let's say the Z rotation here and the Z position here you can kind of have a tilt to one side that's ridiculous but it's there in case you really want to give this character a little bit let's go with about five and the Y and maybe ten just so he leans a little bit further forward when he walks fifteen there we go so he's a little dude he's got more of a determination as he goes good and down to our arms this is where we have if I kind of back out here and take a look at what our our animation is doing in the top viewport turn on shaded mode here the bend we can scale up to about 500 just to see the extreme just going to be at the elbow there so now he's flapping his arms like a chicken we don't want that so let's reset casual Bend as he swings his arm is probably good enough I'll usually kind of leave this alone unless I really want to give him some serious character twists same idea that's how much he's going to twist from the shoulder as he swings his arm 500 is little extreme 100 you know we're going crazy here so I'll reset and maybe you know I'm depending on how much I wanted it to really kind of curve his arms there there we go maybe 200 he's right for this character we've also got things like our swing if I go up to 500 here you'll see that he swings his arms much more wide and broad maybe again maybe 200% so he swings his arms a little bit more but not crazy now he's still in his t pose we'll adjust that here in the future for we've got some things for our collarbone you can adjust its motion and offset and we've also got some stuff for the hands here where we've got our palm settings now we can do some fun things like the digit curl here and if I 500 percent these out you'll start to see those fingers curl every time he takes a step so we can really kind of get some fanciful you know little girls skipping and she curl their fingers or and almost dances there so we'll leave him at about a hundred percent just to get a little bit of motion in there we've also got the the hand twist and flop values if I don't want to be twist his hand so much we can reduce those as well as those flopping around values x and y if we don't want him to swing at the wrists quite as much lastly we've got our head grip open that up and here's our head and right now he's doing this almost I'm kind of drunk look here with his head swaying back and forth a lot so again we'll probably reduce that twist and that rule I'm going by about 50% just to see how it works and maybe even that lifts down to about 75 until his head remains a little bit more straightforward we can go extreme on these things as well if I reset this and go 500 on our twist he's a bubble head going back and forth back to about 50% there again with our roll see the extremes and then decide what you want to do with it now his neck is almost disjointed there so we don't want that to go back to that but 50% on our lift as well how much he's going to raise his head up when he takes a step but we're starting to see a little bit more character in this right now we can always revisit these settings after we do the next portion of this demonstration which is let's get him out of his tee pose and maybe bring his legs in a little closer so that he's not like wide step zombie here I'm gonna go ahead and close the editor for right now and what we're gonna do is I'm going to select the available in our layers here and we're gonna add another layer we've got these other two down here that say plus L and plus W ones for local and the others for world let's add a local adjustment layer okay and let's stop our playback here our adjustment layers allow us to turn on our auto key and add to the original layer so if I want to start him out let's say with his arms to his side I'll turn on my auto key grab that arm and rotate it down to his side so but he's no longer in this t pose with his arm straight out to the side trying to take off and fly away he will remain that way even though his arms are continuing that cat motion movement here so that's a great way we'll just go back to the frame zero and we just start with it by adding a keyframe at the beginning keep your arms at your side and go from there adjustment layer also allows us to change some things that are a little wonky like our leg position in here at the moment as well as maybe our foot pad steps now he's kind of across from each other and we don't want him to I want his leg to be fairly straight up and down at this point and then this one can stay out there but we might want to rotate this leg so that that knee is not just jointed pigeon-holed on the inside there but more straightforward you'll probably have to set some keyframes at various positions I like to go every 6 because it evens everything out here and then we've got our position here our guy's foot may need a little bit of an adjustment to remain straight up and down and then this guy he doesn't need to pull it out quite that much and then maybe also that leg can bend back in a little bit to straighten out let's go to about 12 here and now the problem is on the other foot we can go ahead and twist that out and maybe move our foot contact a little bit more straight up and down and start to get this guy a little less wonky and then once again frame 18 every six frames or so here I like to kind of adjust pull this foot in to a passing position it's a little bit more straight up and down back to 12 that looks pretty good for all this stuff now remember that frames there are 24 are gonna be the same this is a cycle so as he reaches frame 24 if it's drastically different from frame 24 frame 0 you're gonna get a instant jump back and forth and it's gonna look terrible so what we really want to do when it comes to the last frame and the first frame is make sure they are the same thing I can actually select my entire rig and copy over the key frames by holding shift and dragging over from 0 to 24 so that when he reaches this and then jumps back to frame 0 nothing strange snaps and happens like a crazy boogie troll going on here knows a little bit of sway in there cuz I changed the foot pad rather than the pelvis but hey for demonstration purposes this is okay if you don't like the adjustments you've made you can hit this red X delete layer button and we're just right back to where we started where we have to make these these things again go ahead and add that layer and again just for good measure your honor select that available and then add that layer in and then once again aquiline we can go ahead and make any changes I'll do some fast ones here since I screwed it up just to show you the delete function and we will get back on track again I'm kind of going at frame 0 I may even decide to go ahead and do this pelvis over instead of the foot I get a little bit more like that weight shifted properly and where we begin a little bit more straight and even bring that foot in just a bit you will go to maybe all the way to 12 and do the opposite here and this is this is kind of taking over from that weight shift parameter we saw inside the cat motion editor so about 6:00 he kind of goes bowlegged on me so I can bring that knee and rotate it back in as well as well as maybe a just for that straight up and down leg look so that he doesn't go too crazy swivel back and forth on either side there again this is very fast you can spend some time getting this to work perfect and proper there we go and then once again I'll take his entire skeleton and that first frame I'll just hold shift click and drag and copy that keyframe from 0 to 24 so that there's no change between our cycling and we have ourselves a cat motion custom walk cycle here we can add a little bit more attitude we can play with the settings until we get exactly specifically what we want he's got some problems but to continue on with our demonstration this will work just fine all right the last thing we want to do here is now that we've defined our walk cycle between frames 0 and 24 we want to make sure that no matter how long the animation is that we can have him walking right now if I take my time configuration here and I put it back out to something else maybe about 200 frames he's going to continue walking but all those friends we set get lost after frame 24 or he starts to go bowlegged again and and wobble back and forth so I'm going to now that we've got our timeline back to 200 we're gonna select all of him again and select every keyframe that we made on our adjustment layer then we're going to open up our mini curve editor now we've got the ability with cat to use the Edit go up the controller and the out of range types where we can set this thing to cycle indefinitely so he will always make those adjustments as he moves down and then he should walk the way we set him to walk constantly and forever no matter how long our animation is there no matter how long we need to set that animation let me grab a bone here and back on our motion layer we can go back into the cat motion here and up to the Global's we're now on our cat motion range is right now it's from 0 to 24 we'll want to increase that to 200 because that's going to be our animation length especially if we start wanting this guy to walk not only in place but on a line here let's take a look at some of those back in our cat motion tab here under our Global's we've got walk-on spot which is what we've been doing to create our cycle we can also just immediately tell it to go ahead and walk on line and that means our character is going to actually travel forward until the end of the animation all 200 frames if this was set to 24 because we had those cycles turned on he will continue where this comes into a problem is our next one which is our walk on path node let's go ahead I'm gonna put this cat motion range back to 200 which is our time line and I'm going to create go ahead and minimize the cat motion panel right now and I'm gonna create a path that we might want this guy to travel on since walking straight forward or walking in place is not always what we're going to need in an animation just like I would create any path constraint we're gonna go to our shapes and I'm gonna get in line and I'm just gonna kind of click and maybe draw out a curvy little path for this guy to start walking on I'll follow the path here now one of the first problems a lot of new animators run into is that they'll immediately try to assign that path that we just created that line to the path node and that's going to cause us some issues we can assign it but our character is going to go right to the center of that line and walk in place sideways on top of it what we want to do instead is actually come over to our helpers create a dummy object or a point object doesn't matter how big because it's not gonna get seen on our final render and we want to attach this to a path constraint a couple of different ways we can do that the easiest is to just select our dummy object come up to the animation menu and grab the constraints find path constraint and then click on our line that we created which means our dummy object is going to follow the path if we then come back into our cat motion panel here and instead of the line as our path node click that button again and assign him to follow that dummy and he will follow that line granted he's walking sideways right now we'll fix that no problem first thing we want to do is with our notes still selected since that's what he's following from here on out is we're gonna kind of come over here to our path primers I don't want to turn on follow so that he curves with the line not Bank that's more for jet planes than people we don't uh we don't really twist as we go around a curve and fall over almost but down here we've got the ability to switch axes and that might that might actually do what we need to if I go ahead and go to Z and then check oops see at least he's walking straight up and down well we can then grab our selected rotate tool and it's just a matter of correcting so I can go ahead to my angle snap and at frame 1 in local I can actually rotate this guy 180 degrees and our character will be walking backwards but hey it's working all right right now he's starting out facing sideways so I probably need to rotate this 90 degrees and get him started on the right path and suddenly our character now twists and turns and walks and follows our spline curve we've got some ways to adjust this first off we can go right back to our line shape and I can actually raise this line up and you'll notice our footsteps follow the spline shape so he now actually walks up hill and then downhill a little bit less accurate than the final method here we've also got the ability to select each of these footsteps on their own so that if he gets to the middle here he can step and climb up notice it's a little ridiculous because his legs aren't quite that long but he will follow those footsteps wherever you manually put them so you can spend the time to manually place these things let's do something else entirely let's kind of create a go back to our create tab let's go our geometry and let's create a plane give him some ground to kind of follow here so here's our plane shape and if I kind of come back elipse lost and then he'll come back over what define this shape maybe about 500 by 500 and we'll give our length segments 20 by 20 which is we'll just make it so that we can actually add some some shape actually let's do just do one I will just make it walk uphill to starch later on we can actually add valleys and noise and make some uneven ground and he'll follow it just right as well at least closer okay so we want our character to start out walking on this plain and then it will you don't need quite that big 250 there 300 there we go now it's covering our footsteps and I'm just gonna kind of quickly do this so I'm going to right-click convert to editable poly and I'm gonna select this final edge over here and turn on our sauce selection increase it to about maybe there and raise to create a hill in our ground plane and I'll turn off soft selection turn off that editable poly back on our character here I can select any bone in his body come back to the motion tab and inside that cat motion later he's still following our line but he's walking right through the ground we have the option to come down here to limb phases where this should now now that he's got footsteps be available to us where we've got these footprints where we've got our step masks as well as this really cool option here pick ground and it will try its best to move all of those footsteps directly to the surface and our character will walk up down and stay on the change surface on our ground one last thing before we kind of let go I'm gonna go ahead and reset that and get rid of our plane shape we don't really need him at the moment I want to let you know that there are some other things like presets so the cat motion presets are in here and other animators you can save these things out using the Save button down in here when you get a good one so if I decide I can save my my own here two legs I call this low poly guy walk one we can go ahead and save these things you've got some that come with cat we've got game character creep run walk and goth girl walk it looks like if I load in the game character walk just double click it'll ask me do you want to load it into a new layer or the existing layer let's go ahead and say load into new layer come back to our motion to have and see what's happening here I'll need to get rid of my adjustment layer at this point because all those adjustments were made for the other walk cycle and here we've got you can actually do all of this here let's start fresh brand-new cat lair motion two legs game character walk loading to the existing layers find them and hit that animate button we've got some presets that might work a little bit better in fact he's walking a hundred percent better just by starting out with that game character a lot of preset that it gives us now we can go ahead and continue to adjust fully all the other Global's and bones that we've got here this is also a good place for for starting out if you haven't done one yet with a default or a preset that is going to work a little bit nicer for let's say a character running and then we've got some absolutely wonderful beginnings for whatever character we've made as long as it's two-legged because that's the only presets that we've got with cat before a run cycle or a creep cycle and we can get him start and then add our adjustment layer bring his arms back to the side just like we did before so there you go a kind of a quick look at cat motion and we can get these characters moving quickly and fairly nicely Global's tell it to pick our path note here again and my game character will try its best to walk and run along our path you might want to give him a little bit less time to journey because there we go run run run here we go you can get these characters moving quickly with a few problems that need fixed but all this procedural stuff helps you helps you from having to do it all step by step and take a whole lot of time to get these characters going great way to test out your skins make sure everything's following the bones properly and all that good stuff as well as to get a final walk cycle run cycle etc alright

Channel: Clint DiClementi

Views: 72,031

Keywords: Autodesk 3ds Max (Software), Animation, CAT, Motion, Animate, Tutorial, How To, Walking, Walk, Walk Cycle

Id: iqvokcTu9fE

Length: 38min 25sec (2305 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 22 2014