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Tutorial: Adding muscles to a rig

In this example, you take the default human character rig and add a CAT muscle to the front for the chest and stomach definition.

To add muscles to a rig, follow these steps:

1. Open the Human char with muscles.max file from the Chap 39 directory on the CD. This file includes the default CAT human rig.

2. Open the Create panel and choose the Helpers category and the CAT Objects subcategory. Click the CAT Muscle button and drag in the Front viewport to create a CAT muscle that runs from the collar bone to the pelvis on the left side. Then move the muscle plane into position in front of the ribcage bone.

3. Open the Modify panel and set the U and V Segs values to 15. Select and move the outer corners and their adjacent handles to make the muscles bend around the side of the body.

4. Select Create⇒Extended Primitives⇒Chamfer Box menu and drag to create a box with rounded corners. Then create and elongate a sphere object with the Create⇒Standard Primitives⇒Sphere menu. Position the rounded box at the location of the pectoral muscle. Position and clone the sphere to show three rows of stomach muscles.

5. Select the CAT muscle object, and in the Modify panel click the Add button for the Collision Detection section, and select the rounded box and sphere objects. Then move the collision objects to create the desired muscle look in the CAT muscle.

6. Select each of the collision objects, right-click, and choose the Hide Selected option from the pop-up quadmenu.

Figure 39.18 shows the CAT muscle with some deformation for the pec and stomach muscles.

FIGURE 39.18

The CAT muscles can be used to create muscle deformations.

Summary

This chapter serves as an introduction to CAT and covers all aspects of working with CAT rigs, including its presets, custom rigs, and animation. The following topics were covered:

• Learning the basic workflow for creating characters

• Creating and editing CAT rigs

• Creating a custom CAT rig

• Animating CAT rigs

• Creating walk cycles with the CAT Motion dialog box

• Using muscle strands and muscle planes

Whether you're using a custom rig or a CAT rig, the next step is to begin the skinning process, which is covered next. Skinning surrounds the skeleton with a mesh skin and matches the way the skin aligns and moves with the underlying rig.

Chapter 40: Skinning Characters

IN THIS CHAPTER

Planning your character

Using the Skin modifier

Painting skin weights

Using the Weight Tool

Working with the Skin Wrap and Skin Morph modifiers

In the taxidermy world, skinning an animal usually involves removing its skin, but in the Max world, skinning a character involves adding a skin mesh to a group of controlling bones. Skinning a character also involves defining how the skin deforms as the bones are moved.

A character skin created in Max can be any type of object and is attached to a biped or a bones skeleton using the Skin modifier. The Skin modifier isn't alone. Max includes other modifiers like the Skin Wrap and Skin Morph modifiers that make your skin portable. This chapter covers how the various Skin modifiers are attached to a skeleton and used to aid in animating your character.

Understanding Your Character

What are the main aspects of your character? Is it strong and upright, or does it hunch over and move with slow, twisted jerks? Before you begin modeling a character, you need to understand the character. It is helpful to sketch the character before you begin. This step gives you a design that you can return to as needed.

Tip

The sketched design also can be loaded and planar mapped to a plane object to provide a guide to modeling. •

You have an infinite number of reference characters available to you (just walk down a city street if you can't think of anything new). If you don't know where to start, then try starting with a human figure. The nice thing about modeling a human is that an example is close by (try looking in the mirror).

We all know the basic