Here lies the body of Mary Lee Once more into the breech dear friends, once more. Time again for another scripto special. This time it's a reworking of Anipose that I did years ago. But someone asked if there was a new version for 4.x so I decided to rewite it in a groovier and sleeker way. If you used the previous version then most of this you'll already know, but for the rest of you cherries out then, sit down and shut up and I'll explain it all. Hooper! Give him rooooom! Anipose is a small util for making the task of repeatable poses in animation (ani - pose ..... do you see?) much simpler. Take for instance a hand. It can make many different poses, and you'll probably be using them time and again. So instead of having to reanimate them every time you can use anipose. What it does is blend object positions and rotaions and scales from the current frame to a stored pose. Think of it like morphing but only on whole object locations instead of single verts. Installation is, as always, put the script in "UI\Macroscripts". The next time you restart max you'll see it in the customize ui section under "Chugg's Tools".
Here's a quick look see at the UI. It's divided into three sections. Object sets, pose sets and i/o. An object set is a
collection of objects that you want to pose - i.e a hand.
A wee pop-up err.... pops up and you can enter a new name for the set. This then gets added to the drop down in section A. Deleting a set should be obvious so I shan't goin to that. The slim button at the bottom of section A selects all the objects in the selected set. The second section (C) is where you add and delete poses. Simple pose the objects in the set and press the "Add pose" button. Another pop-up, like the add set one, pops up and you can enter a new name. Underneath this button is a slider. This controlls the blend of the pose. When the slider is pressed the current positions of all the objects in the set is remembered and you can then blend from that to the selected pose from the pose drop down. When the slider is released the pose is set. If the animate button is on the keys are set for the objects in the standard way. In section (E) you can save and load the sets of objects and poses. They are saved on *.pbk files.
This is the "Load sets" dialog. You don't really load sets, you merge them. This way you can re-use posebanks from different characters in different scenes. Choose the posebank file in the file-selector and all valid object sets are listed in the left window (A). A valid object set is one that is not already in the scene and one that has all the objects it needs to function properly. Otherwise it won't be available. Move the selected objectsets over into the "To Load" window (B) by using the transfer buttons in the middle (C). Just like excluding objects from lights. When ready press "Merge sets" (D) to ..........merge the sets. This was not a boat accident! And now for the first time ever a snipet of video tutorial. Behold the master at work.
222k in windows media format. You'll need mediaplayer 7 installed to get it to work. But, of course, you'll play it back in mediaplayer 6.4 (for it is the player of the lord) as mediaplayer 7 is canker! You'll notice that the fingers sort of banana up when being animated. This is just the effect of the interpolation of the controllers. It just makes standard keys, so they can be edited in the usual way. Release history:-
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