I’m trying to make a simple walking animation for a simple cartoon-ish character in unity. I’ve spent the better part of 3 hours looking into tutorials and messing around with 3ds max and motionbuilder… and I’m not a bit closer to anything.
I honestly have no idea what I’m doing, or even where to start with animating my character.
This is my model… and that’s about all I have. It has no bones (because I have no idea what I’m doing with them) and its really getting frustrating that I keep flailing around like this and getting nowhere.
Anything that could give me the push I need to get started would be greatly appreciated
I’m not exactly sure about 3DS Max, but seeing how all your body parts are separate you can animate them without a rig right? Just set the pivot to each appropriate object and rotate/move /scale accordingly and create animations with that.
I’m using LightWave3D which supports separate layers within an object file (which get exported fine to FBX as well), so in that way each layer is a separate object with parent-child relations to how I set them. I can also set an individual pivot for each layer. Maybe there is something similar to that in 3DS?
If that’s not an option, create an empty object in unity and export all of the body parts into separate objects and build the object there with proper parent-child relations and the ability to move each part individually?
Or you could also look into tutorials which explains the principles for using bones and rigging your characters?
Here is a tutorial by ianscott888, that shows how to rig a figure that is basically the same as your simple character - a body, 2 arms, 2 legs and a head:
Ianscott888 also provides a link to the start and end blend files for his tutorials so you can explore in detail. Browse through his other tutorials - as he has a number of good, well explained, tutorials on very simple rigs.
Well I think ianscott888 explains all his keystrokes and mouse clicks in the first tutorial : “Introduction to rigging” pretty well - and he gives you the files to play with.
Even if you prefer to use 3DMax - think about what ianscott actually does, then apply it in 3DMax.
Over the years, I have used 3DMax, Lightwave, Truespace and Blender. I found Truespace to be a nightmare GUI - as it seemed so different - but really it has to do more with what I felt comfortable with.
This pretty much. I’ve used 3DS Max, Blender, Maya and LightWave3D over the years. In the end LightWave was the one that stuck with me, mainly because of how organized and structured the program is. It also didn’t feel as intimidating as the rest of the software packages back when I started modeling for the first time.
It all boils down to what you feel comfortable with as Gryff said. There is no good or bad package. It’s just packaged differently.
