It all depends on what kind of animation you are driving for. Most of the time biped is really handy for plugging in motion capture files.

Otherwise, simply getting into the nitty gritty of creating your own rigs is awesome. It also lets you rig it just how you want it with joints & constraints in all the right places.

First thing I notice on your screen shot is that your rear hip joint could do with moving up & back a little bit

~C

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a 3d artist's journal
[Link to blog.cunnington.co.za]

I personally would do it with max bones, I find they're a bit friendlier than biped. You can go use bone edit mode to resize the bones to fit you character better so that skinning will be easier.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

x2.

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Funny I had to rig and animate that exact model the other day, poser horse right?. I rigged it with CAT using the horse preset. very quick, it was all done in an hour or so.
Grab the demo and try and do it all without saving very often.

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Im making a horse for a website. A local bar is asking to have a animated bartender that is a horse and I was given this horse to me from a friend.

I just picked up 3ds Max about 2 weeks ago and I have been on learning overload haha! I now have 3ds Max 9, 3ds Max The Bible with dvd, and Lynda.com's Essential Training Video which I have watched all 9 hours worth. So in short, Im serious about wanting to learn this stuff to add more to my web design. I have always wanted to learn 3D but didn't know where to start till 2 weeks ago.

So far I have tried the biped but his bones dont quite fit even when I modified him and he gets the stretching of his mesh. (as you can see in the picture)
How hard is it to do rigging of bones? The video didnt look too bad but it wasent too informative in that area?

I want the horse to move, turn his head side to side, smile, talk, and use a leg or two to serve drinks. LOL

(I have the Poser 7 but thats another program that I dont think Im ready to learn just yet but looks really cool)

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~3ds Max 9~

Anyone please? I need to know wither to use bones and how exactly, also how to make the horses mouth move. Im almost bald pulling my hair out haha. Oh and cross eyed from the 1,250 pages in the max bible

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~3ds Max 9~

Morph targets are great for facial animation. You'll need several copies of the horse, each with different facial positions. I think 3 is the bare minimum you can get away with, but It's been a while and I can't remember exactly what those three positions are. "EE", "OO" and something else maybe? Anyone else care to help?

For the body animation you could try the CAT demo like Tyson suggested, sounds fairly easy to use.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

From what the bible says its 2, a smile and a frown. As for CAT which is like poser or a completely different program? I have been bumped from Swift 3D, to Poser and to 3ds Max... Im sticking with max.

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~3ds Max 9~

Cat is a rigging and animation plugin for max. it works alot like character studio without all the annoying crap.

for lip sinc you need [wide, narrow, open, closed]. you can make all sorts of vowels from this setup and is piss easy to animate.

eg. a little narrow and a little open= oo,
a little wide and alot of open = ah
alot of wide and mostly closed is = eee. simply put of course.

I'm totally distracted by fallout so excuse my brief response

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Forgiven.

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Please support us and post a [Link to www.digitalartsfront.com] on your website.

--Matt

I downloaded the plugin which is free, and it doesn't work. I have 3ds max 9 32 bit and the file was CAT max 9 32 bit... any ideas?


Site found here... [Link to www.softimage.com]

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~3ds Max 9~

Okay found out that I needed version 2009 and not 9... so how do I use this now? haha

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~3ds Max 9~

there are tutorial videos that you can download from the site covering the basics. Its pretty straight forward. you create a rig from a list of prefab rigs. move it into position. resize its scale (within the cat menus) then you can scale the bones and move the pivot points around to fit your mesh. you can copy and paste the transform info from one limb to another for symmetry. then you skin your character using these bones. to animate you need to add an animation layer in CAT and enable it. Seriously just grab the videos its all explained very clearly there.

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I'm gonna move this to help and advice.

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

Great thanks Tyson, Im going to check that out. Would this also work with the mouth?

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~3ds Max 9~

Okay so all I really need is a horses head that speaks, anyone want to make that for me? I have the horse? hahaha I am off and on with learning max so its taking me a bit to grasp this. I also have to make a bucking bull with no legs hahaha

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~3ds Max 9~

How does it buck?

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[Link to www.3dprevis.com]

haha I thought someone would ask... its for a mechanical bull website, for a local club / bar

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~3ds Max 9~