Re: General Animation Questions


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Posted by Elmek on April 01, 1998 at 05:44:46:

In Reply to: Re: General Animation Questions posted by buzzkill on March 30, 1998 at 21:04:45:

Simple, partly confusing and sometime completly inaccurat explaination of IK:

Lets say you have a bones linkage, for example a leg,
made up of three boxlooking objekts, two for the actual
leg and one for the foot. They are linked from top to
bottom making the foot follow the translations of the
leg. The animation you want to achive is to pull up
the knee like if the character were to stand on one leg.

Using basic forward kinematics you would then first
rotate the upperleg untill the knee is at a good height
then rotate the lowerleg so that the knee angle looks right,
and then perhaps rotate the foot so that it point slightly
down. So we have 3 steps to creating the animation.

Using Inverse kinematics i first set up some ik constraints
(i wont go into them but it can for example be how big the
knee angle can be and how much resistance the bending will
have) for the entire skeleton and then just grab the foot
and move it to the possition were i want it, the program
will then calculate how the translations of the upper and
lower leg should be to conform to the new possition of
the foot. So after i have set up my IK chain i only have
one step to creating this part of the animation.

If you use character studio or have seen the Biped skeleton
in action then you have seen how a IK chain can work.

To enable IK in max you simply press the IK button in the
mainwindow toolbar and animate (after you have set up
the IK chain ofcours:). Setting up IK can be hard at first
but if you dont have character studio i highly recommend
that you use IK for character animation, the animations
mostly look better because the IK takes care of small
changes that you might miss otherwise and it is really
faster even though you have to set up a special linkage.

CS/Bonespro:
No you dont generate a mesh with characterstudio but you can
if you want to use the Biped as a skeleton for a bonespro
based animaton.

Bye
Elmek


: : IK stands for Inverse Kinematics. There is a well-written definition of IK in the comp.graphics.animation FAQ which can be found at the following URL:
: : http://www.tsfx.com/faq.html

: hmm cant find it... mind copy/ pasting it?

: :
: : There is a tutorial covering the use of Character Studio and Inverse Kinematics in 3DS MAX at the following URL:
: : http://www.ktx.com/character_studio/html/summary.htm

: I cant understand most of what theyre talking about in there

: You can generate a mesh w/ CS and animate it with bones pro? How?

: : Dunno what to tell you here, but from what tiny bit I _do_ know about 3DS Max, it sounds like maybe you want to generate a mesh with CS and maybe use Bones Pro to animate it?

: Thanks for the info about the Skin.. havent gotten to the part where I feel comfortable enough with my animations yet to skin them and release




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