This tutorial will show you how to rig up a nifty little custom control board (as shown below) for your characters in 3DS Max. I have found that setting up my own visual interface to work with my characters helps me to animate them with a bit more efficiency. Though you can do this with just about every parameter in Max, I think it is mostly useful in conjunction with the morpher modifier. I've always thought that going into the modifier stack, clicking on the morpher, then scrolling through the list to find the right dial was a pain in the rear and incoherent. But with the control board you have a nice clean way of visually working with the morph targets. No, I'm not the first to do this. However, I have yet to see a tutorial on it.
This tutorial makes the assumption that you are pretty familiar with the 3DS Max environment and know how to set up morph targets. If not, the help files that come with Max are an excellent place to start.
Once you have your character all built and ready to go, you start by drawing up your board with the various shapes that Max offers in the creation panel. Be as creative as you want; however it should be coherent, and it is best if the shapes are nested in a hierarchy (stick your shapes inside other shapes). I also suggest using the align tool to keep things neat and precise.
Having the shapes nested allows you to link them up and move the whole thing around as one piece. So, oddly enough, the next thing you need to do is link the shapes. The white lines indicate the connections I have made in this simple control board
Now what you need to do is wire these controls up so they actually do stuff (go figure). You do this by selecting the shape and clicking wire parameters either in the animation menu or in the right-click quadmenu.
Then select the two items and their parameters that you want to wire. In this case the Y transformation and the Mouth Open morph target.
Having done that, the Wire Parameter dialog now comes up. If you've ever wired up your own custom attributes before, this dialog should be familiar to you. For those of you who are new to this dialog, it is fairly simple. The two tree-view list boxes show you the various parameters that you can work with. The arrows in-between let you select how they relate to each other (whether the item in the left box affects the right, vice versa, or both.) Then the text boxes below let you set the expressions for those relationships.
In this case we want to make a direct relationship between the shape's Y position and the morpher's integral value. So what we need to do is make both sides equal. Right now the shape's value is likely to be greater or less than the morpher's value. So all you need to do is find out the shapes value in relation to it's parent's and add/subtract it from the morpher' value.
(I'm pretty sure that have explained this in the most confusing way possible, but all it is is just a simple algebraic relationship.)
This is exactly what I did. I found that I needed to add 3.676 to the shape's Y in order to make it equal to the Mouth Open morph. I also multiplied the whole thing by 5 (this value was simply guessed at) so that the shape would affect the morph greater with less movement. I took that equation and stuck it in the morpher's expression. Then I simply did the reverse to the equation for the shape's expression (so that you can move the shape's Y by adjusting the morpher's value).
Now just make sure that the two way button is clicked in the middle; then you’re ready to click the update button.
3DTotal
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Tuh Duh! and that should be it. You can check to make sure that the wiring works before you close the dialog (in case you need to make adjustments), but other than that you should be done.
Hopefully everything has worked out for you all right, and you have closed this tutorial so that you can go off and get started animating. However, if it didn't work as we might have hoped, or you simply wish to drop me a line; please feel free to e-mail me at:
