Jacquelin Vanderwood

August 15, 2000

Character Studio 2.0 introduces us to the workings of the program highlighting the basics. Boris Ustaev does an outstanding job of presenting the facts about the product and showing us step-by-step examples of the basics of Character Studio. 

What is Character Studio you ask? It is a plug-in to 3D Studio Max that allows the user to bring a model to life by invoking movement such as walking, dancing, arm movement, and much more. 

In this video, Boris Ustaev introduces us to the Creation panel. We learn what a biped is, adjusting body part links in the menu, the Motion panel, finger mode, and footstep mode. Also touched upon is the Motion Flow mode, the Footstep mode panel, attaching a skeleton, freezing the model, the Figure mode and how to scale and rotate a skeleton, and copying and mirroring. We learn about Physique where we attach a skeleton to a model, and the Physique Initialization dialogue box. Also included in this video is applying motion through the Motion panel, importing/exporting motion files, linking body parts--fixing pieces that are not currently attached, deforming, and hiding attached nodes.

Active blending (adjusting deformation) is demonstrated along with adjusting radial scale (inner and outer), green tics and dark tics (selected rigid envelopes), adjusting envelopes, copying properties, moving cross sections, copying and pasting, inserting a cross section, control points and how to adjust them, using Exclude in the Links panel, adjusting bend, bias, sliding inside and outside, bulge angles, vertices and adjusting their weights, initial skeleton pose and how to adjust their weights and envelopes, and manual update.

We learn about the biped including changing motion through layers, rotating layers and creating a keyframe, snap to original motion option, and making and naming a new layer. 

Next we're shown how to create footsteps, how to import footstep files, Footstep mode, creating original footsteps, applying a model to footsteps (walk, run, jump buttons), bending the foot path, and scaling the footstep length. 

We learn what the Motion Flow editor is, creating clips in Motion Flow graphics, combining multiple motion clips, blending two motions together seamlessly, editing imported clips, Motion Flow Script, how to save and the start and stop frames, biped playback button and wireframe mode, and converting motion to footsteps.

Motion capture is covered with creating a biped, loading a motion capture file and saving it out as a biped file, applying motion capture to any object, Motion Capture Option Properties dialogue box, and duplicating the biped and steps.

And finally, we're shown how to save a Physique file and how that enables us to apply that to another model.

As you can see, this video touches upon the basics of Character Studio. Boris Ustaev does a stellar job of teaching. I recommend watching this video again and again.

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Copyright 2000, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved