Hello Everyone!
I’m somewhat new to BIPED in Max8. I’d love some tips if anyone can help me…
QUESTION:
I’ve applied the ‘Multiple Footsteps’ to my Biped and he walks like a man,
but I’d like to make some adjustments to his hip POSITION for each stride he makes. It seems the ROTATION keys for the hip bone are accesible and adjustible but not the POSITION keys.
Would also like to do the same for his footfalls. Is there a function I should know about that would let me make adjustments to the walk cycle after I’ve applied ‘Multiple Footsteps’??
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Nik Pfistar
Have you looked into the biped methods?
For instance, if you type in biped into the listener, it will return all the methods for the biped class.
The reason there are not position keys for the hip bone, is because it’s position, as well as the positions of all the other biped parts are controlled by the Bip01 or COM object. COM is short for Center Of Mass. This object controls the position of the biped. All other bones in the rig are positioned relative to their parent bone’s rotation by way of IK and FK.
So if you want to adjust the position of the hip bone, you will need to adjust the COM object’s position. You can do this like:
--Assuming that the name of COM object is at it's default name of $Bip01
biped.getTransform $Bip01 #pos --returns the biped's position
biped.SetTransform $Bip01 #pos [0,0,0] true --sets the biped's position and keys it
For more information on Biped methods, type “Biped MAXScript Extensions” into the maxscript search.
EDIT: One other thing to remeber is that the Biped system is different that almost all other max objects, in that standard methods to get and set controllers, positions, rotations, keys, etc, do not work. You must you the biped maxscript extensions to do these operations. Also in the case of rotations, sometimes you might need to use an exposeTM helper object to get the values that make sense. Just a word for the future.
-Dave