Pigham Biped

The biped...in my opinion, one of the most useful, yet extremely fustrating parts of 3DS Max.

As Pigham has a humanoid body structure, I was fortunate enough to be able to use the standard biped instead of having to use bones to create my own one.

As Pigham's limbs are very small in proportion to the body, I was very worried that not only would it be very difficult to get the arms and legs of the biped to fit into the model, but also even if I was able to, if it would look right when animated. In the end, it turned out I had nothing to worry about as I was able to resize the biped to fit Pigham's body. Also because of the way that the biped had been weighted, I was able to move the limbs enough without causing any pinching.




I also wanted to be able to animate the ears, snout and tail. Thankfully, it is possible to add a tail and 2 ponytails to the biped. So I used the ponytails for the ears and the tail for the tail. That just left the snout. I noticed that you have the option to add props to the biped. So I did and stuck it to the snout.




At first, it seemed to work perfectly. However, when the time came for me to animate Pigham walking, I soon realised that the prop is actually attached to one of the biped hands. So whenever the hand moved, so did the prop, as it can be seen below:



In the end, someone suggested that I use an FFD box. I had just learnt how to use this in the eye tutorial and knew that it would work.




The only problem with the FFD box is that it doesnt seem to stick to the model. The usual ways of attaching things together, such as linking and attaching, wouldnt work. So when I come to animate it, I will annoyingly have to drag the box around with the model.