Animating Real- Time Game Characters-P6

Animating Real- Time Game Characters-P6: My intent in writing Animating Real-Time Game Characters has been toshare my work methods, thoughts, and ideas about animating real-timecharacters in 3ds max 4™ and character studio 3®. Any factor that affectsthe animation process using these two tools has been covered.
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Animating Real- Time Game Characters-P6 Chapter 4 Weighting a Character Using Envelopes 139 1. Turn off any unnecessary envelopes. 2. Adjust the Radial Scale of the envelopes. 3. Adjust the Parent/Child Overlap of the envelopes. 4. Copy and paste any appropriate envelope settings to symmetrical limbs. 5. Remove any vertices from the appropriate links, and then . . . 6. Use Type-In Weights to finish the weighting for any remaining vertices. You save yourself the most time by adjusting the envelope settingsfirst, because they affect all the vertices of all the mesh objects to whichyouve assigned the Physique modifier. This is the benefit of using en-velopes — the pure speed at which you can weight a character. Manuallytyping in the value of vertices is the last step in weighting a higher reso-lution game character, because (as mentioned before) it is the most time-consuming process.Turning Off Unnecessary EnvelopesLoad Bikini2.max from the Chapter4 directory on this books CD-ROM(Figure 4.1).FIGURE4.1 A girl and a bikini—what more needs to be said?140 Animating Real-Time Game Characters This character, Bikini, weighs in at 5,663 triangles. Take a moment to study the mesh, and the first thing youll notice is that all the Biped ob- jects and the bones attached to the Biped have been assigned a zero opac- ity material. This is so the mesh can be seen in shaded mode without being obstructed by the solid Biped objects. While there are other ways to make the Biped object transparent, this way is the most reliable (more on this in Chapter 6). Another way to make your Biped less obtrusive when viewing your mesh is to se- lect all Biped and bone objects, right-click on them, click on Properties, and check the See-Through box under Display Properties (Figure 4.2). FIGURE4.2 Turning on the See-Through option is another way to make Biped objects less obtrusive when viewing your mesh in a shaded viewport. While this does make the objects transparent, their opacity is con- trolled by 3ds max, not by you. Still, it is an option. You could also assign a wireframe material to the objects and see them as shaded wireframes, Chapter 4 Weighting a Character Using Envelopes 141even when in a smooth-shaded view. Another way to change the appear-ance of just the Biped objects is to go to the Display sub-menu for Biped,click on the Bones button, and click off the Objects button (Figure 4.3). FIGURE4.3 Turning Bones on and Objects off is yet another way to make your mesh objects easier to see in a shaded viewport. The only problem with this sort of display arrangement is that whenyou click on one of the colored stick figure bones that are now repre-senting your Biped objects, you are actually selecting the child of thatbone. Its also harder to isolate a bone in order to click on it (unless themesh is frozen). Another thing you may notice is there are only three Spine links.This is due to the way the motion capture (mocap) data used for the .bipfile was captured. The motion just works better with three links instead offour. Select all the mesh objects (m_*) for the character, and apply thePhysique modifier to them. Go to the Right viewport, make Envelope theactive sub-object under Physique, and zoom in to the head area. Care-fully select all the links of the head, except for Bikini Head (Figure 4.4).When dealing with the plethora of links that can result in a facial rig, the best wayto make sure all the links are selected, excluding the head link, is to select every-thing from the neck up; then, hold down the Alt key and select the Head link, thusdeselecting it. Next, go over to Active Blending in the Blending Envelopes rolloutmenu, and turn off the links selected by unchecking the Rigid box (Figure4.5). It may take a while for 3ds max to process the action, but once itturns the envelopes off, switch to the Vertex sub-object for Physique, and142 Animating Real-Time Game Characters FIGURE 4.4 Select all the envelopes of the head links, except the Head link. FIGURE4.S Turning off envelopes is as easy as unchecking a checkbox. select the vertices of the head mesh. Theyre now effectively within the influence of the Bikini Head link. Another way to rem ...