I’m pretty green to the whole rigging thing, I’ve done it very seldomly. The big issue right now is the cables and how to rig them to follow the arm automatically. This may be something needed to be done manually? I’m not sure, rigging and skinning is still fairly new to modeler like me.
In the end, this will be put into Unreal 4. Possible 2-3 dynamic poses (ie; attack pose and such) and if all goes well, an idle animation (ie: standing, possibly a boxer type stance animation). I’ve been searching the net but haven’t found what I’m looking for or maybe just over looked not knowing. Any advice or point in the right direction would be appreciated. I will continue to search the web. Thank you for taking the time to look and put in feedback!
Gif animation with issue going on. This is NOT what I want it to do. Think Marvel’s Apocalypse and how his cables attach to him, that’s the result I want to achieve.
You’ll likely want to look into a spline IK rig for that. You can parent the base bone to the body and the ik handle to the forearm. This will not automatically give you good looking animation on how those hoses should move. You’ll likely need some controllers down the spline that you’ll have to animate. Setting multiple constraints on the controllers between the forearm and the body can get you a little bit of movement for free.
Alright, so another issue that I have is the back of the knees. I’ve come across the skin morpher modifier for 3ds max but will these transfer over to Unreal? Or does this all come down to some clever skinning?
I wouldn’t go with biped extra bones for those they are too long and the movement controls wouldn’t be that great. As suggested keep biped but look into custom bone setup over it with spline IK. You also need to keep things efficient to load and save animations, for that Biped is great, the only thing you need to do is to create selection layer for the custom bones you created and “save animation” manually for those as well, by going to Animation-Save animation (read about it), this way when you load biped anims you can load your custom anims to match the file and so on. Can be pretty efficient.
For the skin i’m not sure if skin morph will transfer, it’s worth a try let us know if it works since i never got to try it with Unreal, so far from my trials only skin and morpher modifiers transfer, not even other plugins like Bones pro can go through, FBX is pretty strict about modifiers and exports.
As for skin deformations 2015 and below Max versions have trouble there without plugins and will give you a tough time, if you have the latest version of max with extension 1, Look into Voxel and heat mapping it will help you a lot.
Thanks for the replies, I’ll have to look into those plugins. I went with a Biped and bones with HI solvers for the cables. Linked the solvers to the forearms. Which work fine at the moment except when I bend him over the back ends don’t follow the back/spine whether I link it or add a dummy object and link it. UPDATE: The Dummy object link now works…it didn’t at first.
Not a good idea going with HI solver for this setup if you want control, because it controls things one way up or down. In your setup you would probably want to animate the contraption freely. Create it with spline ik with around three dummies for control or more if you like but three is good since you want to have control in the middle, then link the dummies to the root of your spine.
The IK solver is working for the time being besides when the forearm twists the cables does not follow as well as I’d like it to. Could be a skinning issue since I’m still messing with that.
What would the dummies be linked to before the spine root? The bones themselves or the spline? Here’s what everything is looking like currently.
