Max... bones vs. biped. vs geom. vs helpers

Rigging
#21

We have some 100+ characters for MUA2, this includes Heroes, NPC’s, and other
random people, but it is a huge task to skin/rig that many characters. Biped
cookie-cutter rigging has been pretty useful for culling out most of the
characters. This means that most people can be trained to skin/rig a simple
bipedal character in a half-day, leaving the crazier character rigs for the more
experienced riggers.

I rely heavily on phantom rigs for export (hierarchy to which skin is bound) and
do whatever I please to the rig in between the phantom and the user controls.

Typically in game rigging there is an effort to keep rig parity between the
in-game rig and the one animators use. The exported rig should be agnostic
about what actually drives it. This allows you to “rig for the camera”…to mix
metaphors. If you need a specialized setup for one particular animation, the
special rig is connected to the phantom. Exports become less of a black art.
It does require a bit of pre-planning to address bone counts up front, but the
reduction of re-work has been pretty dramatic.

#22

I agree with Randall and Kelly (above). Use links/constraints to drive your in game rig setup to avoid bugs and not limit yourself to biped.

This ultimately gives you options as a rigger to meet various animation requirement but establish the scope of what your in game rig will need to do first to work towards an acceptable total bone count for run time. Also, consider how many instances of this rig (and its lower fidelity version) will be called during gameplay scenarios.

Construct your rig in a scalable fashion based on that criteria (level of facial animation, muscle simulation, hair/cloth, squetch). Heavily consider 3rd party software you might need to incorporate as intermediate pipeline steps such as Havok or Natural Motion.

Then you can then decide if biped alone will be your pipeline solution (don’t do it! @_@) or expand/replace your rigging pipeline from there. Good Luck. W~

[QUOTE=Randall Hess;1540]At Volition we primarily use Character Studio Biped. Most of our games have only had human bipedal characters and for that simple fact CS:biped has served most of our needs.

Biped Workflow
We dont export the biped rig to game. Biped is used as the control rig and an FK skeleton bound, link constrained, to the biped. The FK skeleton is what gets exported. The FK skeleton is essentially snapshot geometry from the biped with some automated twist controls applied here and there, biped twists are buggy. The FK skeleton may also have whatever additional bones are needed, be it geometry or max bones it doesnt matter. The animators work with the biped primarily and whatever extra attached bones that need to be animated. The base FK skeleton and the automated controls used stay hidden from the animator.

I would have to agree with Rob about rigging in max being a hassle. Unless perhaps if you are Paul Neale. He has some good tutorials and dvds if you really want to get into max rigging. I think we may have touched on Puppetshop briefly but perhaps not nearly as much as we should have, as noted by Rob’s glowing affection and somewhat biased postion on it. :):[/QUOTE]

#23

Seems we have a pretty similar workflow to everyone else… I guess everyone goes thru the pain of trying to actually use a Biped/CAT/whatever skeleton directly ingame before coming to the same solution… :slight_smile:

We export a basic hiearchy of meshes aka “Game_Skeleton” to the game engine. That hiearchy is position/rotation constrained to what ever skeleton we want to use (Biped, CAT, FBX from Motion Builder etc…)

SamiV.

#24

Biped Characters and many other automated Rigs can be nice but in all honesty they are horrible ( at least in my opnion ).

I am a former student of Paul Neale, I learned everything i could about rigging/scripting from him and i can tell you now and will keep telling you that max is my favorite package to rig In ( yes it can be a little more complciated then lets say… Maya ) but with a good knowledge of scripting there is nothing you can’t achieve in max. So for me rigging in max is not a hassle at all :smiley:

Now for the Scaling i have a couple of methods, but when it comes to scaling the whole rig i simply have a Point Helper as a Parent to the Whole rig ( mainly the root of the rig ) and i scale that up and down as needed. As for squash and stretch i drive the X position of the bones child with a wire or atributte hold and then i turn Squahs on the bones properties in the Bone Tools Window.

If anyone needs any help or has any question just send me a PM :stuck_out_tongue: I am not Paul but i learned alot from him.

–
Felipe Nogueira
[email protected]

#25

Scale is EVIL. If you are lucky and your engine supports scale then take your
winnings and walk away. Most engines I’ve worked with have either limited
scale support or none at all. I assume you are talking about rendering as
opposed to exporting to a game engine.

#26

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#27

I have enjoyed reading through these nuggets of info - for as long as I can remember we have simply created the FK skeleton and handed it off to the animators who rig it and work with it, the only subsequent contact we have with it is when bugs inevitable arise for one reason or another.

I’m very keen to expand my understanding of this whole area and this has been a great starting point!

#28

“scales a fail” :smiley: