What is bone?

Rigging a Character is very fun, but most complicated part. I've never used Wire Parameters and other "bla bla Attibute" things before. So I've read 3DSMAX help document and Character Rigging tutorials to learn about it. It is realy getting easier and easier after you getting hang of it.

I didn't used Character Studio biped because I've tried it before and although it has very cool features, but its just... too much. :) I mean, I wanted to Rig my Character on my own. Learn about IK-FK things by the way.

So I start to build my bones, and then done all Control Shapes & IK Stuff. Next thing is apply Skin Modifier to that bones so I could deform mesh object. This part is the most frustrating part. Some parts of the Character's body (like armpits) doesn't deform right. I needed to manualy set weights vertex by vertex. Oh... I hate The Skin Modifier. For now at least. :)

After long hours of vertex weight tweak, it finally looks ok to me. Then, just one more thing to go... GUN! Yes, I need a gun... oh sorry HE need a gun. So I modelled a "Desert Eagle" like handgun. Suprisingly it took me 1 day to finish it. I even got time to take a cool render of AJ's new pistol. :)

Anyway, I've done everything to animate AJ. I created some test animations. Now I'm ready to make places, and start animating.

Scene One

First scene in my animation will be a street. A dark, gloomy atmosphere. Like every corner a thug can jump over you and say "can I have your money my dear sir?". I've made a box, and use boolean to make it like a house. Made a door, doorframe, and door number. It is 667. Because there is Nearly evil BadGuys inside. :)

This is the begining of the animation. I think of make walking along pavement. It is kind of a Cartoon character. But I wanted to make realistic walk animation. It's not going with this type of character but I wonder how does it look? I study some of the Special Operations, SWAT, and Cop videos. Also I was playing "Metal Gear Solid 2" when I'm making this animation and it helped me a lot to study some great animations.

So I made it. He walks slowly near the door, and knocks it with his gun. Nicely done. But there is a problem, you guess... yes, CLOTH. It keeps intersect with arms, or doesn't fit AJ's body at all and drops floor after 2 steps. So I've made some Rigid boxes. They're covering every body part, and attached to bones. I scale them up a little so if Cloth is going to intersect, at least intersect with Rigid Boxes not body of the Character. After this idea... It worked nice. But this time arms reacting very badly because of boxes. So... I've used Deformable Mesh collection on AJ, and deleted Hands, forearm, and lower legs rigid blocks. This time it worked very nice. Actualy, shoulder part of the trenchcoat kind of falling behind but it doesn't matter because it looks good that way... :)

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