| Page 2 of 4 |
Transform Gizmos
For more natural feedback, all Transform Gizmos have been completely redesigned and give a much better representation of what you are doing. The position gizmos Center Box Handle is now switchable to operate in Screen space, giving freeform modelers, without constantly switching between different coordinate systems, far more flexibility.
The rotation gizmo is now displayed as a sphere and offers an easy way to Free Rotate and Screen Rotate. Rotation along axes gives visual feedback through shaded slices which represent the rotated angle. The user can switch between three rotation modes, Linear Roll, Circular Crank and Legacy R4, which is the way 3ds max 4 used to work. The difference between Linear Roll and Circular Crank is basically the way the user likes to move the mouse during rotation, as their names imply.
Both methods show a numeric display of the angle above the specified axis.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
 |
| Hinging polygons from edge (click to expand) |
Character Node
The new character assembly node is a completely new way to manage complex sets of objects, which don’t actually need to be characters.
It simply groups selected objects and stores their attributes, animation, conditions between objects, etc., which lets you save animation of all stored objects in a separate new animation file format. You can also load animations from one set to the other as long as they have a similar structure. 3ds max tries to map the animation automatically, but if the current set has different names stored, a table is available to map each object by hand.
You can also save clips for walking, running or any other type of animation and merge them back together by specifying a start and end frame in the insert animation dialog. A very good example of its usefulness is that you can assemble the hand into one group and write a scripted interface to control the hand bones through stored finger positions, in addition to sliders and other custom attributes, and then use a master character node for the entire character.
Having just one object to care about makes it very easy to merge complete characters into your scene, but script access is probably the most important functionality as you can change every little property of any object inside that node through just one pipeline.
The set Skin pose mode, similar to the figure mode in Character Studio's Biped, lets you specify a pose for your character to go back at any time during animation to easily refine the skinning of the model or any other behavior.
 |
| Character Assembly Bone Tool (Click image for larger view) |
To animate complex hierarchies like tails, spines, ropes, tentacles or even the tongue of a character, you can now easily control them with the new Spline IK solver.
This is one of the easiest-to-use features: You simply create your bone chain using the splineIK solver and after you're done with the chain, just right click and a little dialog pops up asking if you want a Bezier, a Nurbs Point or a Nurbs CV curve to be created. You also can set the properties for the helper objects that are generated to control the spline.
Even when you’re not happy with the amount of bones you have in your chain, just open the new Bone Tools dialog from the Animation dropdown list and refine your bone chain and see the new bones being automatically aligned to the spline. You can also create any curve by yourself and use this for the spline IK.
The Bone Tools dialog offers many tools to change the bone structure of your rig. Refining bones or rerouting bone chains, applying a gradient color from the root to the tip or just alter the shape of selected bones is just a click away through these tools.
 |
| Skin (Click image for larger view) |
For many people, the preferred way to skin a character is to weight each vertex by hand to have ultimate control over the deformation.
Skin now offers a Weight Table window to manage vertices in a more organized way. The spreadsheet-like interface lets you see the weight of each individual vertex, edit their attributes and change their weight, to cite a few of the operations available. Making groups of vertices lets you ‘save’ special sets of vertices you want to work on later.
Skin was always able to paint the weights directly onto the surface, but had a lot of problems which the new redesigned painter engine solves, such as using pressure-sensitive input devices like a tablet. The marker icon also shows you the face normal to make it easier to navigate.
You can even paint in a mirror mode to paint weights on both sides at the same time, which makes it very similar to Maya's Artisan.
The painter engine, though, shows its true strength when used through scripting, and free scripts are already available that use the engine to create a sculpting or scatter tool. Peter Watje, the author of this tool, even wrote a texture painter plugin with it that is available through his site: www.max3dstuff.com.
Prev 1 2 3 4 Next
Related sites: • Animation Artist • Digital Animators • Digital CAD • Digital Post Production • Digital Producer • Hollywood Industry • Presentation Master
Related forums:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
