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3D Studio MAX
First off, I have to recommend this piece of software highly as a very well thought out and powerful game development tool. The staff at Kinetix has always bent over backwards trying to support any project or questions I have ever had. I am fully convinced it is the best cost effective tool to create quality game art. The internal scripting is extremely powerful and the SDK is easy enough for any programmer to learn and write tools for should they so desire. There are a ton of plugin developers who are writing free useful tools to speed up your work everyday. Should your budget permit, I would have to recommend MAX very highly. The model pose in max should be as spread as possible. Make your fingers spread, your legs spread, and and arms straight out. The best way to describe it is the "Davinci Pose". This will make linking vertices to bones or a biped much much easier. Unlike LW, the pivot points have their own local axis, and each object or section can have its own local axis value. So spread the joints, it will save you time later. (See figure 6)
I can't stress this enough, but set up hot keys in the preference menu for as much as you can. The most important are pan view, rotate view, zoom view, x, y, z, and move, scale, and rotate. Getting fast with hot keys is the best way to gain speed in a production environment. Turn off the annoying Non-uniform Scale warning in the preferences menu. Turn on Zoom about mouse point. Again, get a 3-button mouse. The IK iteration technique discussed in the LW section can be applied to MAX's IK as well. If you can, get Character Studio. It is one of the best plugins you can buy if you are going to be animating a lot of 2 leg characters. It works beautifully with mocap and makes mocap, I dare say, a pleasure to work with. The tools built into CS for animating bipedal characters are some of the most intuitive and useful I have ever worked with. The time you will save is well worth the investment for this plugin. Build up a library of animations that you can draw from. Once a walk or run is created, try to store the animation in a way that allows you to call upon it again as a starting point for other characters who may need to walk or run. With CS its as simple as saving the .bip file once you are done. Then you can load it onto any other character regardless of size or shape. This alone can save you hours or days. The default ambient level in MAX is usually set way too high and can make your scene look a bit washed out. When making textures, the first thing I do is set the ambient value to black. Check out www.max3d.com for a wide variety of free plugins. By switching from camera view to perspective view you can get your perspective view to match the camera view settings exactly. With the camera selected you can go to views/match camera to view to get your perspective view to be a camera. When animating with CS and using a Biped a good way to get the hips to swing and move is to animate the Bip01 root object and NOT the pelvis. Also when linking physique to a biped always link the physique to the pelvis and NOT the Bip01 root. In CS using biped and in freeform mode, you can lock the feet and hands by setting a key and going into key info on the motion panel. There you find a kinematics section at the bottom of the panel. By clicking on object and setting the IK blend to 1.0 it will lock the object in place. Great for locking down hands and feet, and this is fully animatable. Fin I wish you all luck in all your animations, and remember to have fun with this stuff. =) When not animating for Westwood Studio's newest title NOX, Jason can be found enjoying the California rave scene and working on his own short stories. His past work has been shown in SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theater and other various film festivals. He has been playing video games since their dawn and loves making them. Jason can be reached at jzirpolo@pobox.com. |
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