Strike a pose! A generic character to play with.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello all!  

I thought it might be fun to get a thread to play around with a character and see what people come up with.  It's often hard to show emotion with CG characters, and it's even harder if they have no face.  Take this very simple character and pose him with feeling!  Have fun with it!  What emotion, concept, or idea are you demonstrating with your image?   This model is ready to go and everything is setup, all you need to do is strike a pose!  Or, just download the character for use in your non-commercial projects.  

Find props here!  (Subject to terms of use.)  

This character is rigged with CAT, has FK/IK blend setup, and uses skin morphs to get nicer shaped bending in the elbows and other areas.  The shader in the attached file is a toon shader.  (Not the same shader as renders above.)  Included versions:  2014, 2015, 2016, 2017.

Idea Man (a.k.a. Generic Guy) was created by Dennis Rivera (Rigging/Skinning) and Alfred DeFlaminis (Modeling/Skinning/Morphs).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

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@melissa.lax wrote:

Hi @Anonymous,

Love the animation! I had the impression your little man was going to pick up a puppy. 

Was surprised to see it was a Max teapot! super cool. How'd you comes across CAT?

If you're curious to delve deeper, I'd suggest checking out:

CAT Video Tutorial series:

http://area.autodesk.com/learning/series/3ds-max-using-cat 

Cheers,

Melissa

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Hello melissa,

when i did this, i was using these tutorials you posted as reference. Especially the 3ds-max-using-cat-controlling-limb-animation was very helpful.

I`m an old character-studio user,btw. I bought it at the time when it was a separate plugin for 3d Studio Max R1. But i think i will definitely trying to use CAT more in the future.

[-niels-]

I already posted this in the Inventor forums for a Friday pictures, but since i don't think many Max users will visit there i just wanted to show what someone with little to no experience with CAT or animation in Max can manage after watching a few of those tutorials:

I'm still a little confused about (key)frames and linking/attaching items to the rig, but it was quite fun to play around with.

[melissa.lax]

Hi @Anonymous

Awesome! makes us really happy to hear. 

Keep it going, can't wait to see what you surprise us with next.

Cheers,

Melissa 

[melissa.lax]

Hi @-niels-

There’s two parts to your question, conceptual and technical.

In regards to Keyframing, this is a conceptual questions. A key frame records the state of an object at a specific moment in time. In animation terms, the drawings are called "frames" because their position in time is measured from the frames on a strip of film. So a sequence of key frames defines which movement the viewer will see, whereas the position of the key frames on the animation defines the timing of the movement. For instance, in the old Disney movies you’d often see pauses between movements, with keyframe you can create the illusion of fluid movements as it fills in those pauses. What you get is a character posing in meaningful and fluid-like poses. For future reference, as a rule of thumb: 30 frames is 1 second of animation.

Ever play chess? This example might help > http://area.autodesk.com/learning/3ds-max-animation-techniques-keyframing

In regards to linking/attaching, this is more a technical question. When you’re linking/attaching objects to your animation what your essentially doing is creating a parent-child partnership or hierarchies. Therefore, you need to consider how the “parent” influences its children. So in your case, your stick man is holding a spear, the arm is the “parent” and “spear” is the child. You’ll need to consider how to create a fluid movement for the arm with the weight your spear now poses.

We created a video series a while back that may be useful to demonstrate this concept. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to control limb animation with a prop.

Controlling Limb Animation (CAT) > http://area.autodesk.com/learning/3ds-max-using-cat-controlling-limb-animation

Hope this helps clarifying things!

Best,

Melissa 

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