What does the term Skinning mean in 3dsmax?

Hello Every body and welcome to Animations on HypefroActive. Well, last time we talked about 3dsmax custom bones. Today we'll be talking about skinning. So what is Skinning?

The 3dsmax 8 tutorial defines SKIN as a modifier "that associates a skeleton with a mesh, allowing you to animate the mesh by animating the skeleton. The Skin modifier works on simple animated structures as well as character meshes. You can use the modifier to control creasing and muscle bulging".
 What this means is that the SKIN is actually a modifier that is applied to the intended mesh to be animated enabling the mesh to choose the bones rigged for the purpose of animating or driving it. Breaking it down further, for you to create say a character animation,

1. You have to first create a model and maybe texture it if you want to.
2. Then you create the bone rigs to drive the model.
3. When 1 & 2 are in place, you add the skin modifier.

Without the skin modifier the bones cannot be associated with the mesh, thus will not drive the mesh. So if the Skin modifier is not added to the mesh to start with, the mesh cannot be driven and whatever animations passed on to the bone rig will not affect the mesh, meaning the bones will move when animated but not the mesh.

Two things, as a newbie i used to wonder what skinning meant, but then i was still in the modelling stage, very far away from animation. And when i finally got to the animation stage i learnt about it and i hated skinning. Why, you ask? Because it was difficult and took a lot of time. An object is just as good in appearance when its well skinned assuming "the model is ok". Skinning can be frustrating and alot of people 

ran from it. Skinning a character at that time could take me up to say three days and i still didnt get it right, just something manageable. But as i grew and kept on doing it, i got better and spent lesser time doing it,up to say plus or minus five hours. The key to skinning is NO MAGIC. It is not that simple either but it is straight forward. Certain bones drive certain parts of a mesh. Lets take the human arm again for instance, the arm bones in animation are divided into  five major joints beginning from the clavicle, the upper arm, lower arm, hand and fingers. Each of these bones drive or affect a certain part of the mesh and should have limits. A bone allotted the upper arm for instance should not have anything to do with the head or the lower body or legs or even the neck. A bone after affecting the portion it is supposed to drive could affect other adjacent bones for blending purposes so that the deformation happens naturally. 3dsmax skin envelopes affect meshes and display colours that blends from red, orange, yellow to blue with the colour red been the strongest points of influence on a mesh. Meaning wherever the colour red is, the bone in that section will greatly affect that part of the mesh. followed by orange, yellow and blue been the least.

 As seen in the picture on the left, the envelope affects the lower body but does not not blend out the colours naturally and that's why we have our mesh looking like that, clustered and in disarray, not well distributed around the part of the mesh been affected by the envelope. The one underneath it however is how it is supposed to look like. And as you can see, the mesh deforms with the colours blending out gracefully.

Skinning like all other topics in 3dsmax takes time but once you grasp it, the rest is cake-walk. However, You have to be patient and learn to use every tool thrown at you. They all are not necessary but you'll never know which works for you the most until you try. The images displayed here are again from 3dsmax 8 tutorials.

A peek into 3dsmax Bones. A General Overview.

Hello Peeps and welcome to HypefroActive. The blog that talks about animations. Today i'll be talking about 3dsMax custom bones.

Bones in Animation are what they are in real life and performs the same functions as those in real life, talking about the human body. The bones in animations drive the sculpted mesh and aids in giving it life. That is to say the mesh springs to life with the aid of the bones by passing certain controls or commands to it through control helpers or shapes or the bones themselves. Not every mesh to be animated would need bones, and you can as well animate a lot of things without the aid of bones. For example, you do not necessarily need bones for a bouncing ball or the movement of chairs or objects in general especially the ones that do not need to deform. There are exceptional cases again where some Animators would rig a machinery in such a way that it is easiest driving these meshes with bones. But this post will be talking about Character animations and Character bones. The bones in a character animation is set up just like the bones in the human body. having a head, neck, limbs, body etc. The idea of rigging a mesh with bones has to do with the various parts of the body that needs to move say

like the arm for instance. In this case the clavicle, upper arm, lower arm and hand bones will be considered and these are like four bones in all driving that arm. Same thing goes to the fingers. if the Hand is a cartoony hand having a thumb and the other part looking glove-like like its a glove then you'll probably have to consider the thumb and the other glove-like part alone. And if its a regular human hand with fingers then all the fingers would be considered for rigging.



Bone rigs would normally span from joint to joint making it look like the bone arrangement in a body in real life. Bones can rotate locally which is independently or
they could be dependent on others or both. Setting up simple custom bones is easy and fun. The complex ones where you find a lot of scripts driving say the shoulders and the spine so that you don't have to animate

everything manually takes time to set up, but it's worth it. 3dsMax tutorials estimate say seven hours or so setting up a complex human bone rig and as a newbie you could spend days setting this up. But as you grow and do this repeatedly, your speed picks up and you could do seven hours or less. Between custom bones and any other bipedal bone setup or the CAT, i've found the custom bones to be more flexible in use and more fluid in movement. It's easy to read curves with the custom bones and adjust these curves. Your animations are more fluid and you can rig it to any pattern you want it to follow or operate.

The truth is, the performance of any rig will depend on how it's designed to function and how good the animator is. But with the custom bones, you get a bit more edge than you normally would when animating. It will appear slower to set up but once you start animating the pain and worries all become history. It's like comparing an automatic to a manual gear and here, you have the Custom bones as the automatic gear. For the Bipedal or CAT bones you dont really have to do much and you get similar results but you have to be very good an animator to make the difference. The custom bones dont naturally come with presets for hand poses or poses of any kind like the CAT or The Biped but as you embark on this journey, you'll find that, this is no problem at all. Now, with the bones in place as represented in the left, all you have to do is skin. Skinning is the process of attaching the Bones to the mesh. So whatever the bones do from here henceforth, the mesh will do also. The reference images are from Autodesk's 3dsmax 8 Tutorials.

Forward Kinematics (FK) and Inverse Kinematics (IK).What they are and how to use them.

Hello People and welcome to another animation edition on HypefroActive. So i just finished talking about curves in animations. In this post i'll be talking about Forward and Inverse Kinematics. The Terms Forward and Inverse kinematics both relate to a state in the hand bones. That's right, no other place but the hand bones. As a newbie i often wondered what they mean whenever i read them up in an animation magazine or piece and i never really got to know what it meant. I tried watching tutorials but it got me confused all the more. Well, months later, i found out that both terms are related to the state of the arms at a point in time.

In 3D, For the arm bones to function effectively or mimic the actions of a real arm, the IK and FK solutions have to be accounted for, in that the arms can easily blend between ik and fk modes when it needs to. Using 3dsmax, any of these two can be achieved while setting up a hand rig by default without customizing anything. But using this method limits you to one of them only at a time and to use both, you'll have to customize the rig to account for both. So how do they work?

If in the FK "forward kinematics" mode, the hand rig is carried about by the upper body or whatever it is that its root parent is parented or linked to. That means if for instance the body moves at all, the entire arm moves with it. This is nice but rigid. I however would advice any newbie to start with this method of animating arms, because with this you'll worry less about the arms and  key less. Learning animation is a slow process and there are a lot of things you will pick up as you grow in the trade, so do not be hasty in applying both modes. The fk mode is a natural when it comes to arc creations and you could get away with most arcs created here.

The IK "inverse kinematic" mode does not follow the  the body or anything. They are independent. Meaning as you animate everything about your character, the hand wont move at all. It stays there looking at you like a dummy until you animate it. The ik solution is good when you have to link the hand to an object or leave it on the floor, chair or anything. In as much as you want it to stay put in one position. So, having said all these, why would anyone want to animate a birds wings flapping or a butterfly using an IK solution? It doesnt make any sense. Well it does, but it would be better of in FK since the arcs would come a lot more natural and you'll key a lot less than you would in IK. If you are animating arm swings while running or taking a walk then FK would be easier to use. IK's for a hand holding an object via an external link. A hand on a wall, or any where that would require it not moving for a while. So that's that about the IK and FK solutions.

A lot of animations to the arm go wrong because the animators do not know what the IK and FK solution does. While one is good for stationing and the other dynamic in nature, they tend to muddle everything up by forcing an arm in FK to stay in place by continuously keying the hand at every frame or so while it still is in FK mode. When,all they needed to do was to switch to an IK mode and position the hand afterwards.

Animations and Curves.

Good Morning People and how are you doing? Yup, i'm still on vacation but somehow manage to pop up something new for you my peeps. Yesterday, i didn't do a thing. Waking up to this Beautiful Morning felt so gooooood and Wow, it was awesome. Ok so so i still have say a week more before i resume animating again and though i still get to do some reasoning and theoritical work, it feels like i'm a newbie allover again. You know, keeping away from the key board for this long a time. Anyways thats that about that. today i'll be talking about curves in animations.

Curves are an important part of animations and are Beautiful to watch. Everything in animation seem to have a bit of curve to it and its not because it's animation, No its because this is how things are in real life. Your lower arm pivoted at the upper arm will navigate in a curved outline. Same thing with the upper body and almost every part of the body as well. This is hard to notice because we seldom think in this direction and everything seems to be moving at once. From walking to sitting down and virtually everything tends to happen in a curve. And a lot of  animators use this to their advantage in everyday animating by just adding curves to their drawings or poses. But it should be stressed that to use curves, you as an animator should understand the pattern to which an action will take place. After establishing the actions with the extreme and in- between positions in place, curves come in naturally at the pointed edges of the animation path to smoothen things out.

It's important to note that for you to achieve exactly whatever action you hope to achieve, the poses must be in place before considering blending the curves to make the path or line of action smooth and not before. That is to say, The poses comes first and the blending of curves comes last.

Also it is important to know that such actions as "A staight leap into the air, that will enable you land on the same spot will happen in a straight line. A straight punch would also be better represented in a straight line with the fist leading from anticipation to action. There are a host of actions too that could happen in a straight line that you could think of in animation and applying the correct one just brings out the spark in your animation. Putting a curve where it's not supposed to be could wreck the intending results you desire and therefor mislead the audience.

So, while it's nice to use curves in animations, it's also important to use them well.

Simple HINTS to Learning #Animations In the correct order that are ALWAYS OVERLOOKED

Hello People and welcome to HypefroActive. In the past one week, i've been talking about 3dsmax CAT and how useful it is and i also talked about poses and other things you need to know in churning out good animations. Well, if We are talking about the CAT rig, there's still plenty i've not touched concerning it but that wont be happening today.

Today i'll be sharing something that I learnt while watching "Richard Williams Animation Survival Kit Master Class Video Training CD". Please pay attention because a lot of us miss it straight from this point and we just quit having watched and put in plenty of time with nothing to show for, animation wise. A lot of animators would say, "so what, it's just a DVD training tutorial". Yep, while you might be right at this point, you must put into consideration what level you are currently in Animations. If You are a beginner and You pick up this DVD for the purpose of learning, you might pick up some new things and probably understand Animation Principles a lot better than before, but been entirely on same page with what is on that DVD, might not happen at that instant. Moreso, Richard is a 2D artist and though thesame principles apply to all genre of animation, been a 3D artist is enough trouble already not to talk about learning a lot of stuffs on a whole new level and on your own.

 It's confusing right? Well don't be. What i'm trying to say is that, you get to a level before doing what people in that level do. Similar to learning how to crawl before you walk then run and not before. It's important that you build your foundation right and in this manner so that you can always retrace your steps whenever you go wrong. Moreover there is a reason why Richards' Animation training DVD is called "MASTER CLASS". How then do you go about this you ask? Well, newbie or pro it's good you get the DVD's, if not for anything so that you see first hand how these principles are interpreted, because learning them from a book really can be tedious. And this is my personal observation.

But, one thing i picked up and cherish so much is one of the things Richard shared. He said, at a time, whenever they resumed for work, they do something more like re-hearse different movements every morning before doing anything. Guess what, i practiced that and it worked. Matter of fact, i still do that till today. So practicing moves to have first hand experiences of how things work will really go a long way in your quest to be a Super Animator. The above images are from google and are use to illustrate what i am talking about. You want to pose right? Pose yourself or act it out first then animate the character. These are very simple things but we get them wrong a lot of the time and at the end of the day, after putting our all as we assume to have done, we quit. Do not quit, approach learning animations the correct order.

Are Poses enough to cough out good Animations.

A Character celebrating.

Hello People and welcome to another edition of HypefroActive. Today i'll be talking about poses in animation. Now, a lot of us knows how important it is to pose a character rightly. And for those of us that are very new and dont know the importance of posing a character, well you could think of it as having a plan in mind and trying to execute it in the right order correctly. Asides the fact that animators have to pose characters in an appealing way. especially following curves, it is also important to get the right pose. Take for instance an animation requiring a character to kick some one or kick high or even kick anything. To go about executing this will require posing the character to get ready to execute the action. Now this may depend greatly on what pose the character is currently in and how it is expected to execute whatever action the animator has in mind. If a character is sitting on a chair and wants to do a 360 degree flip like what Van Damme does in his movies, Then you must understand that the character must at least be:

1. Independent of the support the chair gives and rely totally on his own weight.
2. In achieving one above he probably has to lift his body up by propelling his legs in the air with both hands acting as support for the body.
3. he gets into a squat position.
4. he execute the 360 degree flip.

Anime Side Kick Pose

The different poses for this one action will have to be in place to be able to convince the audience that this is what it is, otherwise not. The Anticipation of going back slightly to propel the character down and forward in a squat, the exaggeration of the legs propelling the body, the timing and spacing and all other principles make this a convincing flip. Otherwise, its going to look like something more of a montage. No matter how you pose your characters or how good you are at posing characters, if you don't really know how this things work, all the technical in-betweens that have to occur for this action to mean something, then you as an animator might not be able to convince people enough with your animations. So while its important to know how to pose a character, its also important to have an in-depth knowledge of whatever action you want to execute. It's like a Writer trying to put up a script about a thief that goes about stealing very expensive paintings which is not a problem for anyone to write about. But it becomes a problem when The place he is robbing is somewhere the audience knows and have been to in real life because this place actually exists. A wall where its not supposed to be or an erroneous shortage of the building's floors could raise an eye brow to critics that are familiar with that place. Unless of course, the writer makes it known that this is happening say in the future or way back like time travel sci fis.

In conclusion, while its important to pose characters correctly, its also is important for the animator to understand the intricacies that goes on in executing an action.

More About The 3DsMax CAT feature and its effectiveness.

CAT Rigs

CAT Rigs

Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to another stunning edition of HypefroActive Animation talk. Now as you know, our blog posts are centered around animations and the software of choice is 3Dsmax. Again, i've at a time not too long ago talked about The 3DsMax Cat Rig. A very powerful tool in its own right that can achieve almost same level of animations as The 3DsMax custom bone Rig would. I use the word almost because the custom bone rig can be very flexible in design and creativity. Using the custom bones to rig a body, the body could be driven by three controls, two of which controls the upper and lower body while the third is an independent control, situated where the hip control is and controls both. That is to say, it parents both body controls and the other two are its children and are driven by whatever action that is passed on to this third control, and can drive the bones linked to them individually as well. Further more, if this setup is built with a spline ik system, then you really get to see how flexible, this kind of rig is. But in the case of the CAT, the setup is a lot more simplified and set to major defaults but can accommodate small changes. Though you could try to set up the body to be controlled with three shapes like the custom bone as described above and set up a sort of look at constraints to make the shoulders point at minor shifts to the body, it still is not as flexible as the custom bones.

Cat In setup Mode

But if you are looking at very quick and powerful animation using 3dsmax software, then the CAT might just be your best bet to achieving this. The CAT studio not only sets up a rig for you to animate with quickly, it also stores animations of all sorts done to a character just like the biped. It stores poses as well and you can recall a whole animation back for re-use. And i mean an entire animation. The best of it is that these animations are transferable to other CAT rigs and can be used anytime within the current project or in another project entirely as long as the animation in question is saved in the CAT animation studio, which other People like to call The CAT layer Manager.


Another good thing about it is that, Animations in CAT are done in layers. Yes just like in photoshop layers and its totality is evaluated from top to bottom. At this point, confusion can set in and i understand why and how. Top to bottom here means, the top layer is evaluated first, then the next and in that order until it gets to the bottom layer. The tricky part and what kept me here learning how to use the CAT feature longer than i should have is that i didn't understand how the layers actually interact. So here it is. Lets say we have four layers on top of each other labelled 1-4 from top to bottom and in animation mode. Layer 1 becomes active when added in the stack and is operational. when 2 is added, it over shadows layer 1, thus 2

CAT in Animation mode and different layers.

becomes operational all through. That means though layer 1 is still present, it no longer is active because it has been over shadowed by 2. and even if no animation is on 2, Layer 1 still wont be active. Think of it as Layer 2 is the current layer CAT recognizes at this point and ready to work with. To make layer 1 active, you have to sort of blend layer 1 and layer 2 together. Meaning you'll tell CAT that from say frame 0-500, layer 1 should be active and from frame 501-1500 or so, layer 2 should take over. Now if you had the whole 4 layers present, the idea is the same.

You can watch or download "how to use 3DSMax CAT video" from the net but i strongly suggest that if you want to really go far with learning CAT, maybe you should consider visiting Autodesk 3DsMax learning channels. In there they'll take you through on how to use the CAT feature sequentially. Again just for the record this was done using the CAT Rig  http://reidchannel.blogspot.com/2014/06/making-of-brazil2014-super-eagles-of.html

And after finishing the Animation, this was the result http://youtu.be/Z-vY3sZ5hlM

So, you see that the CAT feature of 3Dsmax is powerful indeed and can create an animation movie from start to finish plus it works well with mocap data. Matter of fact, I plan doing my future quick animations using the 3dsmax CAT. Tweakings to animations can be done on separate Layers like the local or world adjustment layers to suit your purpose. It also comes with a default walk and run preset and maybe more. And it is suitable as well for crowd animation. So in conclusion, if you are thinking quick and very good animation, whose rig could be set up in about ten to twenty minutes then The CAT is an ideal animation tool.

Learning Animations and the newbies mistake. Keeping things simple.

Hello People and welcome to another exciting session of  HypefroActive. Where we get to talk about Animations mostly. Today i'll be talking about the dos and donts of learning animations. First of i'll recommend knowing your software and starting from the very basics of modelling down to rigging and learning and everything in between.

Once you get to animation, that is in this case the process of animating things is what i mean, like it or not, you are on a different ball game. Now, its possible you animate for five years or more and still not be able to animate close to what people would refer to as fair. And also possible to animate under two years and you are there. The difference and key to growth here is the manner in which you approach Animating.
Alot of people want to set out animating like Pixar or Disney does, while still in the learning stages. filling the whole scene with houses, trees and cars like they see on the big screen. The focus here is The character you are working on and whatever it is the character is relating with. The Houses and tress most times gets in the way or probably slows down your system and that is one thing you dont want happening to you while animating. And sometimes by adding all these things to the scene will probably make the audience expect more from you and they start with questions like why aren't the branches moving and stuff. That my freind is the kind of criticism you dont want.

Now, We could further try to keep things simple by sticking to one character at a time and when you are better off and can confidently handle it, you can make it two or more as your mind leads or dictates. It's important to keep things really simple while animating, because by doing that you wont loose sight of your focus, You improve your animations by tweaking say about twelve or more controls depending again on what you hope to achieve. And it's easily seen and pointed out when something is stiff, even if you cant fix it at the time, but at least you can see. Then it therefore means you are making progress.

Run away from Mocap as much as you can. This feature wont help you as a beginner. You could play with it to see how things work or ginger your spirits but it shouldn't be the way out for you. Mocap for a beginner kills talent. I've seen a lot of movies, especially 3D super hero movies where the Mocap feature are been  used and the characters are just too stiff for my liking. In my opinion, its either the animators are working on a tight schedule and are like "ok, lets leave this as it is for sake of time" or that they dont know how to correct this things because they are not grounded with the basics. The first, i understand but the latter i feel bad about. I dont think any studio should produce animations where the feet of characters have to slide or glide all over the place because that tells me, that the animator has foundation issues.

So another thing i'll like to advice is that you take time, animating with focus on a principle at at time. understand what these principles does and apply them with care. Do not be in a haste to muddle everything up in your animations.

In conclusion, if you start very simple, with a lot of focus and determination, then you could pull this off quicker and in no time than you think.