Rigging Max

  In all the things I have ever done on 3ds Max, the baby model Max was the most complex! I spent way more than thirty hours on just that model. One of the things I wanted to say before I begin how I rigged Max is after finishing everything with polishing Max I actually used a modifier called Turbosmooth. Seeing how so complex Max is with polygons, Turbosmooth worked perfect for him. What Turbosmooth does is iterate the number of polygons on the model and smooth it out more. Now after getting that off my chest lets dive into how I rigged Max. The method of rigging Max is different from all the other ways I ever rigged a model. To start it off, I begun by going to the create tab in 3ds Max and choosing helpers. While in helpers I chose CAT Objects from the drop down. In CAT Objects I selected CAT Parent. With CAT Parent selected I clicked and dragged on the screen to create the basis of where the rigging will begin. Now before, I said the method of how I rigged Max was different and this is where the different process comes along. Usually I would create the rig from scratch such as the bones but for experience I wanted to get more familiar with Max and so I used a preset for the rig. The way I went about doing this was while having the CAT Parent selected in the scene, in the details panel clicked the folder called "Open Preset Rig". The rig I chose was the Base human rig which basically gives you the skeleton for a character. In all honesty for the first time going with this approach, I would actually recommend it only because it's literally creating a skeleton for you assuming the model is a character versus doing the manual way which would produce the same result. Now after loading this preset there still was so much to do such as positioning of the bones, scaling to match the model size as well as rotation.

  In the picture above, the skeleton to the right is the original base human preset skeleton. The skeleton to the left is the edited version that I did of the base human preset. As you can see there's a huge difference with positioning and sizing.

  After creating the skeleton I position it to have it exactly meet the location of the model. Once doing that I begun increasing the size of each bone to match the body through going to each bone and increment the length, width, height or depth. Once becoming satisfied with the sizing of the bones I positioned them in the desire location. For the pelvis bone, I brought it a little back more and rotated it. For the arms, I made sure to translate it to where the bone is in the middle of the mesh. After doing that I begun rotating the arm bones so that the rotation mimics the actual mesh itself. The great thing about rigging and something I just learn is there's a functionality similar to mirror and symmetry. Let's say I position rotate and scale a bone to my liking. Let's say its the arm. There's a button called, copy/mirror limb settings and with that it copies a parameters for that bone. So when I go to the other arm I can hit the paste/mirror limb settings to paste those parameters right on to mimic the other arm. Having said that I did that for the arms and legs. Completing the rigging for Max. If we wanted to we could begin animating the skeleton however upon playing the animation Max wouldn't move. The reason being is because we never skinned the bones onto Max or in other terms welded the bones on to him. The next task you can probably already guess. Skinning Max!