#catrig

My first ever run cycle which I cobbled together in 3ds Max. I’m quite happy with how this turned out, but boi did it take long to get the pacing right. 😱 

I am  p r e t t y  sure this is not how actual spiders move, so I will just call this thing a “giant” spider 😅

Soft8Soft ships Verge3D 2.5 for 3ds Max and Blender

Soft8Soft has released Verge3D 2.5, the latest version of its framework for converting 3ds Max and Blender scenes into WebGL-based 3D web applications.

The update relaxes restrictions on physical materials and adds support for anisotropic texture filtering.

The 3ds Max edition also gets support for animated materials, UV transformations for texture maps, photometric lights, and characters created…

One of the things I wanted to try making this trimester was a muscle system, mainly because I wanted to achieve a better sense of realism in my models and animations. I especially wanted to do this for the creature I’ll be making for CIU212. I thought It would be wise to try this out on a different model this trimester first to see how it goes and learn the how’s and why’s. So I know what to expect and hopefully if this one holds well enough I can use it as a base for rigging the creature for final project.

So over the last week I’ve spent most of my days rigging and skinning my creature for ANM230. I decided to go with a CAT rig and try out the CAT muscle systems to achieve nice deformation, skin pull and jiggle. I had never used a muscle system before so this was completely new territory for me. Originally I had planned to use Maya muscle however after some deliberation I decided to use MAX’s CAT system. For a few reasons, firstly because no one else on my team is using Maya and it might cause issues when importing/exporting this system into MAX. I haven’t done my research there so I don’t know how software compatible those muscle systems are. Another reason was that I’m finding myself a little short on time as the trimester is coming to a close, and as I’m quite familiar with max and rigging in there, I decided this was a smarter option as it would save me a bit of time.

 As I hadn’t done this before, I looked to the net for some guidance. I found a digital tutors tutorial on CAT rigging which included a section on CAT muscle and creating jiggle. This was super helpful and pretty much taught me all I needed to know to get this done.

I started with making a custom CAT rig then adjusting most of the bones with edit poly to try and get the bones to resemble the shape of the creature. I feel that if I took the extra time to do this now, then it should make skinning a little easier. I added twist bones for the forarms and calves to get nice skin twisting in those areas.  After that I skinned the creature to the bones and created a test animation to see whether it deformed properly. Once I was happy with the skin, I began creating muscle strands and attaching them to the rig, which I then skinned to the model. To get a nice jiggle, I applied a spring controller to helpers that were on the muscle strands and adjusted the mass and drag parameters to suit the part of body it was applied to. I had actually used the spring controller once before in a custom rig I made a few trimesters ago (Which I learned how to do from a tutorial by Stephen Britton, one of my lecturers at SAE) and was happy to discover you could apply these controllers to CAT bones as well.

I’m quite pleased with the results! There was a bit of trial and error with connecting certain muscle strands to bones to see whether it would create the results I wanted in the stretching and deformations. I also looked up some muscle anatomy to get an idea of where I should make the strands. I might have gone a bit over the top and created muscle where I didn’t necessarily need it, like the three strands in the forearm. I probably could have just made one, as I already made twist bones in the rig, but hey, it can’t hurt.

I also approached skinning in a slightly different way, before now I used to use the weight tool along with selecting the vertices I wanted to apply weights to and do it that way. However after watching a tutorial on how to make a cat muscle system, they had used the paint weight tool for most of the skinning. I thought I’d try this to see how it fares, and I have to say, it’s so much nicer. It feels a lot more natural to do it this way and more creative as well. I feel like I’m painting or something haha. It almost makes skinning fun xD