

- #Playing simultaneous animation tracks in cheetah3d software#
- #Playing simultaneous animation tracks in cheetah3d series#
It's the nuclear option but it works.Ĭheck that your model topology is good for the kind of things your character will be doing. Sometimes, if I have a scene that has a lot of hairy model construction nodes in it, I'll just export my mesh as an OBJ or FBX mesh and import it in so it will be guaranteed to be clear of the cruft. In Maya, that means freezing transformations and deleting construction history. Preparing a mesh for animation mostly has to do with making sure your model's topology is clean and it's not loaded with a bunch of cruft that will cause you headaches when rigging. Character planning and checking your topology But we can cover the basics for those unfamiliar with the process and help keep some best practices in mind for building your own rigs. In film, rigging is a job of its own, often separate from the animator's job in larger studios. If you were hoping that you'd be ready to animate a crowd of orcs after reading this article, I'm sorry to have to disappoint you. Building a complete character rig for film is very complicated and beyond the scope of this tutorial, so we'll cover the basic steps to give you a starting point for further research. That's a simplified version of the rigging process. Addition of wire controls and additional deformers.Painting of vertex weight influence of joints on the skinned mesh.Tweaking the character mesh for rigging.Character animation packages vary in depth, but the workflow is the same for all:

When people think of 3D animation, probably the first thing that comes to mind is either a well-dressed mouse flying out of an explosion, a talking fish, or a very punchable Star Wars character with a terrible accent and equally terrible catchphrases (how wude of me).

We'll continue from where we left off, with a textured model that's ready to animate (see above).įrom there, we'll move on to rigging. There is a lot to cover, so let's jump right in. I'll try, as best I can, to cover how certain programs excel or fail at each and mention which programs are better-suited to which type of 3D artist.
#Playing simultaneous animation tracks in cheetah3d software#
The things we'll be covering in this section are, like the previous article, fundamentals that span software and workflows for film, game development, etc. The long-rumoured 64-bit Qt port of Maya for OS X is out, Pixologic released the fantastic ZBrush 4, Cinema 4D R12 and Houdini 11 added some sweet additions, and SIGGRAPH 2010 was enlightening with some ground-breaking changes to the world of 3D.
#Playing simultaneous animation tracks in cheetah3d series#
It's been a while since the first article in this two-part series came out and it's shocking how much can change in the span of a few months. I'd like to apologize for the long wait for this final portion of our 3D on the Mac series.
