3d Lesson 19 - CAT Animation Lesson

This week's assignment was to work through a set of CAT Rigging tutorials for 3ds Max, in order to create our own animations and bipeds.

Part 1 - Preset Rigs

The first tutorial introduced the preset rigs that came with the CAT software, in this case I used the base humanoid.

The CAT biped is far more user friendly version of the standard biped, I did not have any trouble setting it up around the provided model.

Once I had the biped wrapped around the model, all I had to do was add a skin modifier, and then I played one of the pre-loaded animations that CAT has built into it.

To my surprise the model animated fairly well even without weights, I really like the biped as it cuts down on the amount of work needed, compared to using the default built in biped.

Part 2 - Custom Rigs

The next thing was learning how to make my own custom rig, for a model.

Thankfully this was far easier than I initially thought. I started off by making the pelvis and lining that up on the model, the next stage was simply to add legs then a spine and just gradually add more bones, or complete limbs from the inbuilt menu.

Once the main skeleton was done, I added additional jiggle/ detail bones for the belly and bane, before skinning the model the same way as the humanoid.

Even a custom rig animates really well, although it's not perfect, yet I can see this tool being incredibly useful in creating base rigs and animations.

Part 3 - Absolute Layers

The third tutorial was looking into the CAT's animation layers, which work as a way of separating and blending animations together.

To start off with, I made a new animation layer, and animated the rig in a handshake animation - this is a useful tool as it makes it far easier to sort through animations and poses.

I created a second layer, which is displays over the first, and animated the rig waving. The tutorial ended by explaining how I can use the layer weights, which work much like opacity in Photoshop  to blend animations together, or to hide one or the other.

Part 4 - Adjustment Layers

Adjustment layers are a quick way of tweaking an animation.

I imported an animation from another biped and merged it with my current one, they merged together but I had to tweak my biped to even out a few errors. This is where the adjustment levels came in, and allowed me to tweak and straighten out the bones.

I found this feature really cool, as I could perfect an animation over time with a few small tweaks.

Part 5 - CATmotion Layers

The final layer type was the CATmotion layers. I'm assuming these import preexisting built in animations or animations captured from mo-cap suits.

Anyway, this was another simple task of simply, altering existing values to turn the default CATanimation run, into something far more believable. I also noted that I did not have to alter any existing weights, as altering the values of the animation altered the weights of the model to smooth out the animation.

I could also have the animation follow a path, that I constrained the model to, on top of this the path can edit itself to walk over terrain.

I really enjoyed using this tool, and I definitely would consider trying out animating overall if projects made use of this feature.