Procedural Humanoid Walk (Part 1/2) - 3ds Max CAT Animation Tutorial

Hey, fellow animators, I’m Miloš Černý. Today we will be creating this walk cycle for a humanoid mech. It will be done using 3ds Max CAT as usual and we will use it’s procedural Motion Layers. I have a similar tutorial of animating a run for a wolf already. You can check that one here. The model is a Mech or a Robot but I was trying to animate the walk as a human like. Because that’s the model I had and most of you want to animate your custom models anyway. So it’s better to show it on something with a mesh then just a basic CAT human rig. But let’s start already. Go to a Motion Panel and create a Motion Layer. You will probably have something like this. But don’t worry, it can get better. Open up CATMotion Editor and let’s start setting things up. First change the speed of the animation to be a little slower. To 30 frames for example. Also let’s change the timeline to 30 frames so it loops nicely. Ok, first thing. Let’s fix the knees. Find “TargetAlign” under the Ankle and set the first value to 1.0. Much better. For the Pelvis, let’s scale down most of it’s movements. Twist can be scale down to 20%. WeightShift even more, down to 12.5%. And Roll as well, to something like 50. Ok, let’s move the Pelvis a bit lower by changing the OffsetPos for the X axis. Now rotate the arms so we have a better idea of the overall pose. Also maybe let’s rotate a KneeAngle so the knees point a bit outwards as they move. Offset it up by maybe 30. With the Chest, we have to do something similar as we did with Pelvis. Scale down Twist to 75% and also offset it to the left by 5. The Roll can be scaled down to 10%. And for the Pitch we have to build a curve. Set -3 value for these two points. You can see that it jumps up and down a bit already, but let’s bend it a bit more, by offsetting the whole curve down. Twist can be offsetted to the left even more. And let’s offset Roll by -25 as well. The head is awful at the moment. Offset it’s Y position, so it moves a bit back. Twist doesn’t have to be here almost at all. And Roll even more so. Pitch needs a curve again, so let’s build one. Set it to -5, -10, -5 and -10. But it’s still bad, because we also have to offset it to the side. Ok, this looks much better. We don’t need lift at all for the head at the moment. Let’s move on, to the arms. However, we have a little problem here. 3Ds Max has this bug here where Twist and Swing do the same thing. It’s only in newer versions of 3ds Max because it wasn’t there in 2014 or even 2016 I think. But it’s ok, because we can work around it. I will show you in a minute. Let’s change the Bend for now. Something like this. Also the Swing. So the arms move to the front a bit more. We also need to change the swinging of palms by changing HandFlopX, to minus 150%. So the curve also flips. It’s already much better but it also has to be offsetted to the left. To bend fingers a bit, change DigitCurlAngle. Offset the whole curve by 15 for example. Now some more details to do. Like bringing Pelvis even lower. And changing the tangents of the bottom points. You can see how it affects the animation. The jumps up and down are much snappier. Now, the position of Collarbones. Take a look a Y axis. Now the pose looks kind of aggressive. But if we bring the shoulders lower, it’s immediately more relaxed. Which is what I want. But such a simple detail changes the feel of the whole animation. Also, you should sometimes play the whole animation with the bones hidden. Because the animation usually feels different when you hide them. You can see that the animation is still not ideal and that it needs some more work. We need to add more movement to the upper arm but because of that bug, we couldn’t solve it procedurally. However, we can add an Adjustment Layer and fix it there. Just key the upper arm on frames 0, 15 and 30. Then move the arm a bit back on frame 0 and do it for the last one as well. For the other arm it’s very similar. But, do the offset on the frame 15. Don’t forget to set those animations for both upper arms to loop. So the animations stays the same even after you change your timeline. It looks better now, but the bending of the arms is too much. Let’s scale it a bit down. Palm to maybe 50%. And arm bending so it’s almost straight in it’s extreme, but not bent so much in the other extreme. Pitch for Chest could be offsetted a bit so it’s not so aligned with the Pelvis. Also the arms move to the back too much. So let’s offset them by 5 degrees to the front, but without autokey turned on. So the offset applies for the whole animation, not just this frame. And now, this is what we have. We haven’t touched the legs at all for now, but we will do that in a next video. Try to look at the animation from different angles. Also with CAT you can switch with one click between walking on spot and walking in space. So use that as well. There is almost always something to fix and this animation is not the greatest either. We will continue with it in a second part, but hopefully even this should be sufficient as a guide of what you should look at and what parameters are interesting in the Motion Editor. So that’s it for this part, but I wanted to give you a heads up. I will be again abroad a lot during the upcoming 30 days or so. So I will not be able to work on the videos too much. But, don’t think that I have abandoned the channel or stopped doing videos at all or something. I will be again able to work on them hopefully in the second half of October, so things will get back to normal again. Thank You guys and thank you to all my Patreons. And see you in a next video. I am Miloš Černý and Thank You for watching.

Channel: Miloš Černý Animation

Views: 27,921

Keywords: cat, 3ds max, 3d, animation, cg, cgi, tutorial, learn, 3d model, render, autodesk 3ds max, 3dmax, 3d studio max, 3ds max 2018, 3d animation, game engine, 3d rendering, animation software, animation programs, what is animation, how to make animation, how to animate, walk cycle, the walk, 3d studio, 3ds max 2019, 3d character, 3ds max animation, game animation, character animation, learn animation, walk cycle animation, run cycle, how to become an animator, 3ds max cat

Id: jNTi1j2qEoM

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018