Animation Pt. 2

In order to keep things backed up and prevent causing problems on other parts of the animation, I saved each part of the animation as a new file - this allowed me to work with things on the current section without influencing anything other part of the timeline.

After using footsteps, I then had to manually manipulate the character to animate him. His first movement was to realise he was about to step on a TV remote, and pull his leg back whilst looking down towards his feet. To do this, I took the final frame of the walking animation, and manually used keyframes to rotate and pull the leg joints so that he would pull his leg back, and also set keyframes for his head to animate. I did find a few problems with enveloping at this stage - so I had to fix these when necessary, in the same way as I had done before.

He also reaches down with his arm, as if to bend to pick up the object.



Next, I wanted to have him pick up the remote. I saw this as quite a complicated motion - but however, I think in this kind of situation it can be advantageous to use cameras and cutting things to suggest actions without actually seeing them happen - in this instance you see him bending down, and then the next thing you see is him standing up with the remote now in his hand.

I then used keyframing to move his back, arms, and head - whilst keyframing the remote to move with his actions. I quite liked the use of camera work here as I felt I got some good angles on what was going on.



Next, I used more of a first person perspective - this was perhaps one of my favourite parts of the animation. Instead of watching the minotaur simply doing all the actions from one generic view, I decided to mix it up with various angles. In this way, you can see the Minotaur looking at the remote, and I then used keyframing to animate the hands and fingers, so that he appears to press the remote.

First animation

Once the Biped was applied properly, I could then begin animating. Before I did so, I made sure to apply the last changes to the scene, in order to make sure that all of the clips would be consistent when rendered, rather than adding to the scene later.



The first thing I needed to do was have the character do a walk animation. To do so, I used the footsteps tool. The way this worked was to select the biped, and in a dialogue box choose the amount of steps, and choose the stride/gait etc. 3D Max then generates the motion for the biped, and in turn animates the character. To start with, I simply had the character walk into the room, and using a second camera I did a clip of the character almost stepping on a TV remote. When edited together, they should flow into one scene well, simply appearing to zoom on the foot closer up.

Fixing Envelopes on the Biped

Applying the Biped to the polygons, although partly making the character ready for animation, was not the final step before I could use it, though. In some instances, when I moved a part of the biped, some of the vertices of the polygons did not move properly, and created very obvious problems for animation.


The reason for this was because when the biped was applied to the model, it used default settings to create envelopes - telling the program which vertices are "attached" to each part of the biped. Since the envelopes were not big enough, they missed some of the vertices further from the limb, and left them behind creating a stretching effect. However, if the envelopes are too big, they can also pull on vertices of other polygons you dont intend them to.

To fix this, I selected each part that was suffering from this problem, and then clicked on the modify panel, and clicked the "Physique" heading, then "Envelope". From here, I could modify the size of the envelopes to make sure they incorporated all of the vertices that should move with that limb.

Since I did not seperate the legs before applying the biped, the envelopes would sometimes interfere with the leg opposite, which did cause a bit of a problem. However, I managed to get around this by unlinking all of the vertices from the biped's legs, and then locking the vertices in the opposite leg as I manually applied the envelopes to them individually.



Once all of the envelopes were fixed, the Biped could be moved to manipulate my character properly.

Applying the Biped

Once the biped was correctly aligned with the character, I then proceeded to edit the structure to fit my character as well as possible. Using the scale tool I could widen the leg and arm joints to fit the structure more realistically - since the minotaur has fairly thick legs and large feet, they are quite different in scale to a human structure. The head also had to be scaled up quite a bit, seeing as the character has a large head for its body - partly due to its bull-like appearance, and partly due to its cartoon-like quality.

Once this was done, I then selected all of the polygons that make up the character, and applied them to the biped. Now this was done, I could then manipulate the biped to make the character move accordingly.

Putting the Character model together

Upon finishing modelling my character, I looked into the animation process. However, I found that many methods of animation used characters that had been modelled from one single poly that had been edited into the shape of a character, rather from seperate parts that had been pieced together. Therefore I had to look further into methods of creating a character from multiple objects. Doing research online I discovered that this would be possible by applying all of the polys to a single biped - a sort of skeleton within Max.



To do so, I positioned my character with its arms outstretched, with the arms, hands and legs all in place, and dragged a biped out to the same height of my minotaur. I then proceeded to move the biped's limbs so that the skeleton sat within my model, with the leg bones in the middle of the legs, arm bones in the arms etc. The hands were a little more complicated - to do these I had to define the biped to have 4 fingers, and 3 sections to the fingers so that they could bend realistically.