Hello, I have been using max for 3 years now and I am in a maya animation class at the Art Institute.
I am supposed to either skin and bone a character of my own, or grab someone elses and use it. Either way, it cannot have a full rig, just the bones attached to the model with IK/FK setup.
I am supposed to take the character and animate a basic walk cycle.
I made my character more animatible, and made a nice bone system, complete with IK/FK. I cannot however seem to attach the bones. He doesn't want us painting verticies onto bones, so I don't know what to do as far as that is concerned.
As I started running out of time, I started searching the web for a model that is already setup. The problem is that everything has little helpers, or dummies, or whathaveyou setup into the rig.
As I said before, I just need bones attached to model. Nothing else.
Now that you know my problems, can anyone give me the steps to attach bones to a model, or give me a link to a free biped model that has a basic bone setup?
I appreciate your time, Thank you.
Parent them to the bines!
I'm assuming by bones you mean joints. I used to be a MAX user and sometimes I still use the term bones when I'm talking about joints. Did you use the joint tool to make your skeleton and added IK strings to the arms and legs? So what you basically need to do is bind your skin(model) to the bones? A basic smooth bind should work. Select all your joints and then select the model. Go to Skin menu-Bind Skin-Smooth bind and go to smooth bind options. Set your bind to selected joints and and bind method to closest joint. That should attach the skin to the joints. You will probably have to do a little weighting around the armpits, hips, and knees.
The first character I ever made in Maya is just as you describe, a skeleton with IK/FK and no rig. I just used the Joint tool to make the skeleton and then used the IK Handle tool to make IK strings for the arms and legs. It should be a fairly simple process.
No he wants the segment that span joints to render out. In all reality bone=joint with the exception of any tip (its juta a different way to thinkabout the same thing). In this case parentting is much smarter than binding anything.