Rigging reality

Hey all,

I would like to know what you guys think personally what is a good way to rig in 3dsmax, some thing you have learned and the things you think that a rigger has to know and the things you better not use anymore in max.

It would be also great to sum op how much methods there are to rig in max. I have been bussy with rigging not so long and I would like to get a feeling about everything around rigging and finding out how big the concept rigging is.

I hope I am not asking some strange/noob questions, hehe.

Thanks in advance

Nysuatro

The concept of “rigging” is huge. It’d be impossible for anyone to describe every method and idea of rigging in a thread, or even in an entire book. There are some general areas of rigging though that you’ll want to start to become familiar with as you learn.

[ul]
[li]Skeletons/Bone/Joint Setup
[/li][li]Skinning and Mesh Deformation
[/li][li]Rigging/Node Networks/Constraints
[/li][li]Controls and Animator Friendly Setups
[/li][li]Expressions/Scripting
[/li][/ul]
Those are for rigging in general. For Max specifically, someone with more Max track time can chime in, but from my experience you’ll want to start learning how to use wireParams, the Reaction Manager, and in general just familiarize yourself with the program as best you can, as with rigging you spend a lot of time “under the hood” and really need to know what’s going on with the app and your scene in order to create (and fix) proper assets.

Good luck to you! Rigging is awesome.

Check out http://www.paulneale.com/ he has some good tutorials and information that will help you out in rigging max.

Alright, thx for the replyes.

Are there people using the reaction manager? I don’t understand this is in max. It works 5% of the times I use it.

RM and reaction controls are sort of Max’s equivalent to Set Driven Keys in Maya. It’s buggy and difficult to use but it does have it benefits.

We use it sometimes when we want (or may want in the future) non-linear curves for our controls. If not you can use wire parameters instead.