Ahh, animating. My old nemisis...

# 1 07-05-2006 , 11:14 PM

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Join Date: Mar 2006

Location: Canada, British Columbia, Victoria

Posts: 289

Well... I have a question. For large models, like anything organic and bypedal, that is usually one object, how do you animate it?
Do you?:

1. Use Lattices? I did a tutorial (mtmckinley.net, thanks mike.)once on tornado's and to animate it I used a lattice.

2. Just manually key where the verteces/face/whatever are going to be at a certain time?

3.Skeleton? But I dont know how you would do that because (atleast, the only method I know of) in skeletons you can only attach one piece of skeleton to one piece of separate geometry.

4.IK handles, what are they? maybe thats what I need to use.

please help me out here, (quite obviously) im a noob at Maya(only been doing it for about 3/4's a year)(is that very long?).

cheers, bobalie

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# 2 08-05-2006 , 12:02 AM

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Join Date: May 2004

Location: Utah, USA

Posts: 369

The answer to your 4 questions is:

YES user added image

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# 3 08-05-2006 , 11:45 PM

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Join Date: Mar 2006

Location: Canada, British Columbia, Victoria

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yes? As in all of them? Ok... this is gonna take some time... user added image

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# 4 09-05-2006 , 02:24 PM

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Join Date: Jun 2004

Location: Cleveland, Ohio (USA)

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most times for sometype of creature you want to create what's called a rig for moving your character. for some good maya tutorials on how to create a rig (which usually use ik, skeletons, blendshapes, etc.) check out the rigging section at www.learningmaya.com. click the tutorialslinks button on the top left, then choose the rigging category and read a few of the tutorials.

https://www.learning-maya.com/index.p...art=0&search=*

or you can try clicking that link. that should take you directly to the rigging section.

Accept no substitutions.

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# 5 09-05-2006 , 09:16 PM

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Join Date: May 2004

Location: Utah, USA

Posts: 369

I know you're just getting started but be warned that good rigging can get pretty complicated. What I mean is that it's not just a matter of building a skeleton with some IK solvers. You have to decide what you want your model to do. Personally, I don't just build one rig for a model. I end up with 2 or 3. Each one has a specific purpose. It's possible to build a super rig that can do everything but it can become so complicated that trying to trouble shoot the thing when it doesn't work right will drive you mad. I build my control rig seperate from the skeleton that the model is bound to. In other words. I have 1 copy of the skeleton that is only used to control the model via skin weights. That's all it does. It isn't designed to make the model move. The control rig is a second copy of the skeleton that has all the IK handles, set driven keys (SDK), expressions, etc.. built onto it. It also has a low res copy of the model attached to it so that you can animate and preview your animation in real time. The full res model probably won't move in real time since it has a lot more vertices that need to be calculated....

Anyway, the idea is this; you do your animation with the control rig and the low res model then, when you're happy with it, you connect the control rig to the bound rig (the skeleton with the high res model attached to it). Now you can set up your lights and render. This kind of a set up takes a little extra work but it pays for itself when things start going wrong and you need to work on the rig. Sorry but I left out a lot of little steps for connecting the control rig to the bound rig. I use a half dozen MEL scripts that I paid for to be able to do this kind of a thing. It was money well spent.

IF you want to see a model of mine that uses a control rig and a bound rig then go to my site and check out my alien model.. user added image