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Specific Tips and Tricks
Lightwave Lightwave is a great character animation tool despite what most people think. And for the price, it offers much to the gaming community. I have to recommend it highly if you are new to 3D and also if you may be working on a tight budget. The modeling package is one of the best I have seen for dealing with low poly objects. When modeling your character, try to have him posed in a way that makes the limbs either horizontal or vertical. LW works off a world coordinate system, and this will make joint rotations much smoother of a process when you bring your character into the layout package, if everything is aligned to x,y, or z.. I usually position the arms straight out from the body, and the legs straight down. (See figure 5)
Holding down the ALT key in layout, makes the mouse and left button perform either pan, zoom or rotate, depending on which one you last clicked on. (Very useful) I hardly ever have to go out of perspective mode simply because it is so easy to just hold ALT, click, and rotate a bit around the character to get my bearings. Clicking on center twice will center the view on an object and give you back control of the screen. I use this double click a lot when I want to look at a particular object and use the ALT-click-rotate to get a different perspective, quickly. Puppet master is very nice if you are working with single-skin low-poly meshes. Combined with LW's IK, this combination can be very can be a very powerful production tool. It will also give you a good idea of how your model is going to deform in most game engines. If you are using Lightwave's IK, then I suggest using a null at the wrist and another at the elbow. The ones at the elbows, I would parent to the chest. This method I have found lends itself nicely to producing fluid arm movement. The same can be applied to the legs. One at the knee and one at the ankle, with the one at the knee parented to the root. When modeling use the W key in poly mode to isolate 2 point and 1 point polygons for clean up. If you don't have one already, get yourself a 3-button mouse. The middle mouse button is useful for selecting and deselecting objects in the scene. (Also used a lot in 3D Studio MAX.) If you terminate the shoulder and hips and make use of the 2 IK handles per joint, 9 times out of ten there will be no need to set limits. And if you should decide to set limits then use the Shift-[ and Shift-] to speed up the process of setting them. Shift-[ sets your minimum and Shift-] sets the maximum. Another nice thing to do early on in the setup process is to turn off all the movement channels for the joints that only rotate. LW will remember the channels turned on and off when you save and exit. This will prevent a lot of hassle later down the road as you get into a groove. I would also suggest starting the scene empty and creating all your IK nodes first. Then once they are all in. Start to bring in the pieces that make up your character in the order that they will be linked in the hierarchy. So for example I would create 1 null clone it 11 times for my IK handles and then bring in the root piece of the character. Then I would go out from there starting with the upper leg piece then the lower leg to the foot and toe. Once the legs were in I would bring in the sections that made up the torso… then the upper arm… lower arm… etc. etc. This will add simplicity to your IK calculations and will also make for a clean setup when you need to scan the list of objects. Shift-Cntrl-Alt-F1 turns on experimental features. Once on, you can then use Shift-Cntrl-Alt-F3 to tweak your IK values. I use this function mainly when dealing with complex characters and complex multi-chain IK. You can turn the max number of IK iterations down to speed up workflow. Once your nulls are set and move the way you want them to, you can crank up the IK iterations much higher and then preview your work. Once satisfied you can set the IK high and render. But when working rough to get down your timing, keep it set low so you can work fast and get good performance screen redraws. The joint may not look perfect but once cranked up they behave the way they should. After a while you'll get a good feel and just be more concerned with the placement of your nulls. Play with your goal strength values on objects that use IK. Usually, I set the feet objects at 50 and the knees at 2 or 5. This almost guarantees my feet won't slide. |
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