Dominance War V - The Rigs

So I've chosen these two.

I hope these serve me well!

3D Studio Max Rigging.. Holy Crap

*whew* 3ds Max is one hell of a cool tool, I wish i didn't dismiss this thing back in my hay day. It does some wonderful things! For example:
Rigging.

Be it Maya, XSI, Milkshape, what have you. The meticulous task of placing bones, the process for binding the mesh to those bones, and then ESPECIALLY the tedious task of painting weights were the bane of my existence.

Oh 3D Studio Max. Where have you been hiding your wonderful rigging features from me?

So from what I understand, "CAT Tools" is all the rage. Its not the most stable thing in the world but when it works, it works very well. This Rig allows me to very easily create chains of bones that can be reshaped and molded to my liking. But ive played with autorigs before. XSI has an especially cool auto biped rig that does wonderful things right out of the box. In fact i dare say it may be better than 3D Studios, but the next bit is the candy that makes my mouth water: The Skinning process.

No that does not mean we take a virtual knife to our poor characters. This is the process of binding the mesh to the bones. This process is absolutely tantalizing and relatively painless in Max.
In Maya and XSI your two options for Skin Weight Alterations (the process of assigning which bones have how much influence on the mesh on a per verticie method) was manually selecting these verts and and assigning a value (0-100%) or using a Skin Weight painter for that more natural feeling. Nevertheless its a tedious process. In XSI and Maya the amount of influence is shown in a Black and White overlay on the mesh. The whiter it is the more influence that bone has on that vertice.
In 3D Studio Max, the amount of tools at your disposal is ingenious! You start off with an cyllyndrical Envelope that encompases the the mesh around where the bones influence would be. You can adjust the Inner envelope to define absolute 100% values, and you can adjust the outer envelope which tapers in influence from the center to 0%. It gives an incredibly NATURAL feel.
But of course there's fine tuning too.
There does exist the Skin Weight paintbrush and the ability to manually input influence values, but what I've also noticed is the "+" and "-" tools, here i can select my verts and hit one of those to gradually increase or decrease influences on an infinitely more controlled level.
The mesh while skinning influences takes on a multi coloured appeal to it, showing you which bones have which influence all over the place instead of just the selected bone. It gives you much more visual information than any other tool I've ever used.

And of course, ALL of these tools work seamlessly together.


3D Studio Max just took the #1 thing i hated most in the animation pipeline, and made it painless.
I think I have a new friend.

Dominance War V - Pre-Challenge Animation Challenge

Wow, thats a mouthful eh?

HO KAY

its been.. years? since I've updated this blog in particular, im sure absolutely NO ONE reads this but hey, im gonna use this old guy here as my place to display my animation stuffs anyways, so here goes!

If you have NO IDEA what Dominance War is, its a annual challenge amongst some of the biggest community names across the internet involving Entertainment Industry work (primarily Games). Typically modeling challenges from the start its since included Concept Art and new this year (and why im here explaining this to you): Character Animation.

yup, its time to dust off my rust and get back into the wonderful world of aniamtion.


SO. The challenge is i got to take 2 of the 4 selected models, I must rig these bitches up, and animate a 6 second (no more no less) fight scene. It doesnt seem to state anywhere that it must start or end, so i guess it could be an In Progress fight or something. No matter, I will update shortly with my chosen characters and I think I want to try my hand at 3D Studio Max 2011 this time around.

So here we go!


-Kyle