According to the Autodesk knowledge network, "The CATRig is the hierarchy that defines the CAT skeletal animation system. It is a fast, sophisticated yet flexible character rig that is designed to let you create the characters you want without having to write scripts." In basic terms this just means that 3DS has pre-made characters and models for people to use for animation and games, all they have to do is skin the character (3DS also has ore-skinned characters). I just recently started working with these rigs and so far my experience has been pretty positive, all of the pieces of the character are connected so moving the character for animations is very simple for users. This is all based through the hierarchy section which I touched on in my last post but if you didn't read it then here's the rundown, all of the objects were selected and linked together in a specific order so when the parent object is moved the childern objects automatically follow. This was the Marine CATRig which had no textures and I just used the motion presets to make the rig look like it was dabbing. The whole process of creating the rig and moving it around was very simple thanks to how easy 3DS makes it for idiots like me to create cool models, 3DS provides simple bones and skeleton for users to adjust based on what they want their animation to look like. Overall CATRigs are probably one of the most important parts of games and I can't wait to work with them more in the future.
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Over the past couple of weeks in class, all of us students have had our heads down trying to get the final work for the quarter turned into Mr.B. All of this work that we have been doing has been focused around animation and rigging in 3DS Max. For me every class period I've had to work on these assignments have gone by like a blur because of all of the work that has to be done, I started out working on the bouncy ball project which was just to get users familiar with the curve editor and how it works alongside autokey and the timeline. We had to make an animation where the ball bounced off of three different objects as well as change directions three times. Overall I thought that the final product looked pretty good thanks to the stretch and squash that I applied to the ball before and after the frames where it would hit an object. This assignment did teach me how to work around the curve editor (as it was intended to) and it taught me some more things about the timeline and how to increase duration of the animation by working with the time configurator. The next assignment that I had to complete was simulating a game designers job, where I had to to rig a lamp for an animation, then without animating it submitting the assignment as if we were sending it to an animator. All I had to do for the project was create the dummy's that were used to move the object, apply the constraints to link the parts of the lamp together, and arrange the hierarchy so that the animators job would be as basic as just doing the keyframing. This assignment took me forever, I had to follow a written tutorial which to me is hard because I get off task very easily, and just learning the new things like constraints and figuring out the specific way that the objects had to be linked. But overall this may have been one of the most important assignments as it is simulating the real life work that game designers have to do and how they work with other people in the industry. Both of these two assignment have been very important in class teaching the basics of rigging and animations and I hope to continue work similar to this in the future.
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This quarter has felt like a complete rush in my eyes, it started out with the basics of lighting and cameras which was very small quick unit then continued on to become rigging and animations which is where the entire class is right now. When I started on the cameras and lighting unit I had been out of class for a week so I had a ton of work to catch up on so I had to put my head down and focus on the unit, overall the whole lights and cameras unit was very crucial to the basics of any game because without lights and cameras there wouldn't be any games for anyone to play (I did a previous post on the importance of lights and cameras in games). The final project of that unit was to create a demo reel of models that I have done this year and it had to be a camera moving around the model and it had to properly lit so you could demonstrate that you actually have learned something in the unit, below is the final product of my demo reel that I posted on YouTube. (Make sure to Like and Subscribe for more content like this :D) Once I was done with the lights and cameras unit it was time to move onto the final unit and most challenging unit of the year, rigging and animation in 3DS Max. Now I haven't gotten very far into the unit but I can already tell why students in higher levels of game design dread doing rigging but cause it is long and tedious. I'm on the the first assignment of the unit and I have already spent a couple of days on it (probably because I'm not very smart and get distracted easily), in the assignment we have to follow a written tutorial on learning to make a ball bounce like it does in real life primarily using the curve editor. This has been as I said a very long and tedious process because once I learned how to make the ball bounce I have to make it bounce around a room, hit three objects and change directions three different times. This has been very very challenging for me because working with the curve editor is not very easy for someone challenged like myself and it's not self-explanatory like most of the other things in 3DS. Hopefully soon this process will become second nature to me like other tool in 3DS Max but for right now it doesn't seem like it. Overall this quarter has felt like a blur and I definetly need to put my head back down and get to work on this rigging and animating.
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May 2021
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