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• Learn by example: If you're working on a cartoon character, then by all means, watch cartoons. Traditional cartoons understand and invented the language of cartoon motion, including squash and stretch, exaggerated motion, or scaling eyes large to indicate surprise. If your character motion is more realistic, find the motion, videotape it, and watch it over and over to catch the subtle secondary motion.

• Use background animations: The Viewport Background can load animation clips, which can make positioning characters to match real motion easy. This is a poor man's motion capture system.

• Include secondary motion: The primary motion of a character is often the main focus, but you can enhance the animation by looking for secondary motion. For example, when a person walks, you see his legs take the steps and his arms moving opposite the legs' motion, but secondary motion includes his hair swishing back and forth and shoelaces flopping about.

• Use the Flex modifier: The Flex modifier gives soft bodies, such as tails, hair, ears, and clothing, the realistic secondary motion needed to make them believable.

• Use the Morph modifier: The Morph modifier can be used to morph a character between two poses or to morph its face between the different phonemes as the character talks.

• Use IK: The next chapter covers this in detail, but here's a quick tip: Having a character move by positioning its foot or hand is often much easier than pushing it into position.

• Use the Spring Controller: Another good way to get secondary motion is to use the Spring Controller. This controller works well with limbs.

• Add randomness with the Noise Controller: Often, perfect animation sequences don't look realistic, and using the Noise Controller can help to make a sequence look more realistic, whether the Noise Controller is applied to a walking sequence or to the subtle movement of the eyes.

• Use manipulators: Manipulators can be created and wired to give you control over the animation values of a single motion, such as opening and closing the character's eyes.

Summary

Characters are becoming more and more important in the Max world and can be saved as separate files just like Max scene files. Combining a detailed skin mesh with a skeletal biped lets you take advantage of Character Studio's unique animation features. This chapter covered the following topics:

• Designing your character before building

• Working with the Skin modifier

• Reusing animations with Skin Wrap

• Bulging muscles with Skin Morph

In Part X, “Dynamic Animation,” you'll examine the dynamic animation features, starting with particle systems.

Part X: Dynamic Animation

IN THIS PART

Chapter 41

Creating Particles and Particle Flow

Chapter 42

Using Space Warps

Chapter 43

Simulating Physics-Based Motion with MassFX

Chapter 44

Animating Hair and Cloth

Chapter 41: Creating Particles and Particle Flow

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the various particle systems

Creating a particle system

Using the Spray and Snow particle systems

Using the Super Spray and Blizzard particle systems

Working with MetaParticles

Using an object as an emitter

Using particle system maps

Using the Particle Flow interface

Every object that you add to the scene slows down Max to a small degree because Max needs to keep track of every object. If you add thousands of objects to a scene, not only does Max slow down noticeably, but also the objects become difficult to identify. For example, if you had to create thousands of simple snowflakes for a snowstorm scene, the system would become unwieldy, and the number wouldn't get very high before you ran out of memory.

Particle systems are specialized groups of objects that are managed as a single entity. By grouping all the particle objects into a single controllable system, you can easily make modifications to all the objects with a single parameter. This chapter discusses