Creating Morph Animations with 3ds Max

From Multiverse

Creating and Importing Models

Creating Assets  •  Creating Collision Volumes  •  Exporting Models to COLLADA  •  Targeting a Wide Range of Hardware  •  Model Conversion Tool  •  Creating Material Scripts

Using 3ds Max

Using the 3ds Max Export Tool Creating Attachment Models Creating Morph Animations Transferring Biped Skeletons Implementing Vertex Lighting

Other Tools

Blender: Static Model  •  Blender: Anim. Model  •  Blender Physics  •  DeleD: Static Model  •  DAZ Studio: Creating Characters  •  DAZ Studio: Avatars  •  Using Poser

Overview

Morph animation enables you to smoothly transition from one facial animation to another, for example to make a face go smoothly from frowning to smiling. This tutorial shows how to create and export morph animations from 3ds Max.

Prerequisite: To follow this section, you must have Autodesk 3ds Max 7 with service pack 1 or 3ds Max 8 with service pack 2.

There are multiple ways to produce morph animations in 3ds Max and the method described here using the Morpher modifier is the only way that currently works with the Multiverse platform. This method is more diverse and powerful than a straight morph animation and for that reason has become the default for the platform.

The information for morph animation is stored in the .mesh file and not in the skeleton file.

Process

Select the mesh and make a number of clone-copies of the mesh and move them to the side (this shift is dropped in the export tool.)

1. Load in a file with a mesh on which you want to perform morph animation.
2. select the mesh to be morphed (In this example, it is head01)
3. Choose Edit > Clone > Copy > Name the Meshes. This example uses iterations of the same name: head02, head03, and so on.
4. Select each morph target mesh and at the root level in the stack move the verticies to create a new shape. Be careful not to delete or add verticies or your morpher modifier will fail at bind.
5. Here is an example:
   
   


6. Select the Base mesh and add the Morpher Modifier
   
   


7. In the morpher modifier rollout select and assign the morph target heads to their respective channels.
   
   


8. Testing - After all your morph meshes are targeted into channels, adjust their weighting in the rollout and then you will be able to see the changes in your base mesh.
   
   
9. Follow these steps:
   • Goto frame 1. Make sure all the morph target influences are at 0 (zero).
   • Keyframe the animation
   • Go to frame 10.
   • Set the weight on all the morph targets to 100.
   • Keyframe the animation.
10. Export the model/animation