Is there any way to turn off the annoying biped constraints so you can position the biped bones in world space? Instead of in the figure mode scaling and positioning with rubber band on?
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/21398/
this thread might help you… you could just put markers or other joints in the location you want then use a max script maybe? to move the biped joints in to position you placed the locators.
Sorry I am not more help, I try and stay clear of any biped related work.
in my limited experience, biped is super restrictive and it can be hard to get around its pre-determined workflow. that thread does look helpful though, as long as you can run the same commands in figure mode, not sure if that works.
p.s. hi jared, i think we crossed paths a couple times at midway - and you went to aip with mike poisel, who is a friend of mine. small world strikes again.
LOL, Mike was my roommate in Chicago too! I didn’t know you guys rode BMX together way back in the day. We can take all this offline LOL. Did you get out of Midway before the crazy MK crunch?
Anyway, Yea I avoid biped like the plague too for reasons like this. Moving the COM isn’t the hard part because it isn’t constrained to anything. but moving individual limbs is where it seems to be impossible. Like trying to move the Upper leg positionally in world space is impossible, the only way looks like you have to scale the pelvis.
As far as I know… you can only directly reposition these nodes:
Neck
Clavicle
Spine (base near the pelvis)
Finger/Toe roots.
Hips are connected as though a rod ran through the COM and the pelvis.
Probably knew all that already.
This discussion has come up here at Volition recently. One idea thrown around was to create nodes based on where you want your joints, and then write a tool that will:
- Rotate your biped bone to point at the custom joint (using a vector offset?)
- Iterate a scale function on the parent bone of the biped bone while checking the biped bone’s position after every scale “nudge” till it gets where you want.
Unfortunately, you still won’t get accurate results with this, since you can’t move most bones away from their parents.
[QUOTE=anim8d;2903]This discussion has come up here at Volition recently. One idea thrown around was to create nodes based on where you want your joints, and then write a tool that will:
- Rotate your biped bone to point at the custom joint (using a vector offset?)
- Iterate a scale function on the parent bone of the biped bone while checking the biped bone’s position after every scale “nudge” till it gets where you want.
Unfortunately, you still won’t get accurate results with this, since you can’t move most bones away from their parents.[/QUOTE]
You are gearing up for a new project- switch to PuppetShop. You know you want to.
As a character TD, I hate using out of the box stuff like biped, CAT, and puppet. Just because whenever an animator ask for something out of the ordinary (happens daily) I spend more time creating workarounds and working against canned rigs.
Now if I wrote puppet shop, then it wouldn’t be as bad since I would know everything under the hood 
Life would be so much easier without animators :D:
We would not have a job with out animators:)
That said, if I had to get back in to rigging in max again I would be on PuppetShop or Cat faster than you can say…“MayaMotionbuilderMAxSoftimage”
Watching Robs demo of the Puppet shop tools during 3 December last year was great and then it was released free again and boom baby, fantastic. It is a great system and very user adjustable… I think Rob should just do a video capture of what he presented, people would move away from the Biped abomination.
At some point we can be ok with the fact that we don’t start from scratch or build it our self every time we need to do a rig, and spend the time on all the other character setup issues that need to get addressed than worry about the core stability of the animation rig.
None of us here wrote the IK solvers we use, or the Joint/Bone code so whats wrong with taking that further and abstract some more of the systems.
There are things coming from Softimage, Anzovin studios,others that are going to allow us to have a small set of tools that work for many rigging uses instead of all the custom, bolted on rigging that I and the rest of us are doing these days. I am looking forward to it.