Character not moving with object

[hawk911]

Hi everyone. I  have a scene where a simple biped character is sitting in a vehicle. Then the vehicle backs up but the character remains in the original position not moving with the vehicle - BUT here's the catch - ONLY when I render a sequence of frames.  When I move the slider to view the wireframe animation he moves with the vehicle just like I planned. When I render any individual frame he will be in the correct position as well. The only time he decides not to stay sitting in the vehicle and move with it is when I render whole or part of the animation.

After checking many frames one by one I thought it was fine until I started rendering the whole thing and noticed all the sudden the character was not longer moving with the vehicle.

I have no idea what to do. It seems to be fine until I render a sequence of frames.

The character is a biped and he is skinned. I selected his center of mass and attached that to the vehicle and I thought it was working fine. 

Thank you in advance for any help. It's been a while since I worked with 3ds max so I'm really at a loss on what to do next

[hawk911]

I'm using 3ds Max 2010 SP2 on a Windows 7 Pro 64 bit achine.  Oops. My sig is old. 

[Anonymous]

Sounds odd. Try post this in the render section too.

Is Skin on top of your stack? Can you show the Modifier-stack?

[Steve_Curley]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Try post this in the render section too.

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Or not, as that would be a breach of the forum rules. Asking for this thread to be moved, however, would be fine 😉

[hawk911]

Thank you. I didn't think of posting there instead. Can you move this to there please?

I'll check the stack.

Can I post a link to my project in case someone wants to open it and take a look to see whats wrong?

[Steve_Curley]

Moved 🙂

Remember to zip your project. If it's smaller than 5MB (zipped) then you can attach it directly to a reply, otherwise yes - upload it to a service like Dropbox and post the link.

[Anonymous]

My reason to suggest a double post, was how unsure I am what is wrong - rigging, rendering or something completly else.

Personally I never look at Shading. Lighting and Rendering and if people looking there never look at animation... Well you know where this is going 🙂

But certainly, rules must be followed.

[Steve_Curley]

I know - it's a bit of a pain, but if not enforced you get multiple threads with different responses (or worse, the same ones!). At least this way they're all kept together 🙂

[PROH]

Hi hawk911. Some time ago I read a thread with a similar problem at the Corona forum. The animation rendered correct when frames were rendered out one by one, but didn't work when the whole sequence was rendered. As I remember it, it turned out to be a bug in Max, and the workaround was to specify the sequence in another way. In the Render Setup Dialog (Common tab) there are 3 ways to define the sequence to be rendered: 1) Active time segment, 2) Range (xx to yy), and 3) Frames (by number). I can't remember which one didn't work as expected, but the one you are using might be the "rotten" one. Try one of the other methods and see if the problem persists.

Hope it helps

[hawk911]

Thank you. Last night I tried rendering the other way and both ways have the problem.  The only way that works is rendering each frame individually.   I'm lost.   Here is a link to download the file if anyone wants to play with it.  I've attached and linked and tried all sorts of things. I pretty much wreak at 3ds max now and have forgotten most of what I once knew.  It's about 22MB in size. There are 4 simple characters. The one with the problem is obviously the guy on the forklift.

https://files.secureserver.net/0sq0Z8NO5q51sP

[hawk911]

Sorry I forgot to add that the scene is using Vray 1.5 so some users may not be able to use it

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Okay Hawk911, here's what's wrong:

On the biped in question you've linked both Bip01 AND Bip_Pelvis to the forklift, making the Bip01 a single free floating object. That makes it look like it's linked to firklift, but your render tells the truth. Biped is broken!

I tried to link it back to normal, but couldn't get that to work. Then I tried to place one of the other characters in the forklift-guys position and link it and it rendered fine (I changed it to default scanline render since I haven't got Vray).

In other words, you need to re-skin forklift-guy (Or re-physique as you use) and ONLY link Bip01 to forklift! (You should actually make a Dummy object as an inbetween the two)

Finally you should ask Steve C to move this back to Animation and Rigging, because it's certainly a rigging problem 😄

[Steve_Curley]

I should start charging for this service... 😛 (Oh, moved back btw).

[hawk911]

BubbleWrapBoy, thank you!

That makes sense. Now I remember initially linking the pelvis of the Biped and having a problem then linking Biped and later making a dummy object and linking it.  I just kept trying things like a dork but was adding steps on top of each other apparently.

Thank you very much! I'm going to delete that character and redo him on the forklift.

Thank you Steve for moving this thread back and forth.

You guys are great!

[hawk911]

I need to make a dummy object and link the character's center of mass to the dummy and link the dummy to the forklift, correct?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

First I would align Dummy to forklift, then link it to forklift. Then make the characters sitting pose and take a snapshot of the pose (In the Copy/Paste section in Motion-panel). Finally link Bip COM to Dummy (Carefully!!!).  

I don't really know if the dummy is necessary anymore. In the old days linking Bip to any object could crash Max. Now I just do it by default 🙂

[hawk911]

Thank you very much for all the help