Autonomous Characters

Fall 2003

Tuesdays 3:00-5:50pm

Location: HIB335

3D Studio Max Directions

Note: These directions may not correspond exactly to the versions of software that you will be using.  Therefore, it is important that you follow the spirit of the directions, rather than the exact letter of them.  If you are having trouble, please email wmt@uci.edu.

 

  1. Open art/max/person.max
  2. Turn the Autokey button on.  It should turn red.
  3. Change the top center pulldown from “View” to “Local”.  (Make sure you do this every time you start Max.)
  4. Move bottom slider to the point where you want to change a keyframe.
  5. Click on a piece of geometry to select it.
  6. Choose the rotate icon at the top center of the screen. 
  7. Use each of the three circles to rotate in that axis.
  8. Do not translate or scale any nodes above the waist (B_pelvis is okay).
  9. To make sure that a full pose is preserved in time, select all and then hit the big Add Key button.

Pose Copying Maxscript

  1. Run the PoseCopy Maxscript by going to the top right tab on the right of 3D Studio Max, clicking “Open Script”. Then pull down File->Evaluate All. (Ctrl-E also works.)
  2. Go to a frame that you want to copy. 
  3. Click the copy button
  4. Go forward in time (backwards breaks it) to the frame where you want the pose to go, and hit paste.
  5. In general, the purpose of this script is to allow poses to loop cleanly.  Therefore, when you want to make sure that the last frame of an animation matches the first, here’s what you do.  Go to the first frame, hit copy, go to the last frame, hit paste.  It should now essentially work (though you may need to tweak the middle of the animation a bit.)

Exporting Maxscript

  1. Run the Exporter Maxscript by going to the top right tab on the right of 3D Studio Max, clicking “Open Script”. Then pull down File->Evaluate All. (Ctrl-E also works.) NOTE: Due to a bug of some sort, it is NECESSARY TO EVALUATE ALL TWICE, or you will get errors.  If you evaluate (or hit Ctrl-E) twice, this problem does not occur.
  2. ***Pull down the list where it says “Exporter Modified”, and select “Exporter Modified”.
  3. Unclick the box for exporting mesh and geometry data.
  4. Set start and end time.
  5. Choose B_root_node when asked for the root node in the hierarchy.
  6. Enter a location to save the file.