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.
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