Transformation Animation - Animating in 3ds Max
Transformation Animation - Animating in 3ds Max
I decided to animate the morph of my character in 3ds Max using the morpher modifier and the rig from Mixamo. I chose to animate in Max, rather than handling all of the morphs in Unreal as it was quicker this way and I was more confident using Max when it came to animation.
I experimented with a few different animations first to get a feel for how I wanted my character to move and react to the transformation. I made sure that the iterations were rapid so I could rule out what I did and didn't like quickly.
When it came to using the Morpher modifier, animating the morphs was fairly straight forward as each morph slider could be keyframed, meaning that it was just a case of setting where I wanted each morph to start and stop.
I was originally going to have a transformation including the entire body, however as time went on I realised it would take too long to achieve, so I decided to just stick to the head.
The biggest part of getting the animation to look right was in the timing of the movement, as if it was either too slow or too fast it would make the transformation look unconvincing, therefore there was a lot of back and forth and tweaking involved to get the desired look. Also, importing and playing the animations in Unreal using Sequencer helped to double check the timing and how the end product would look which helped me to visualise what needed changing.
Below are all the head morphs that I created for the morph animation. I made sure to name them appropriate names as the Morpher modifier takes the name of the mesh you select as the morph, so if correct naming conventions aren't used, the morph list quickly gets confusing.
Most of the morphs were made in ZBrush, however some more basic ones were made in Max by just duplicating the mesh and using soft selection and the Shift brush found in the Freeform tools menu.
I experimented with a few different animations first to get a feel for how I wanted my character to move and react to the transformation. I made sure that the iterations were rapid so I could rule out what I did and didn't like quickly.
When it came to using the Morpher modifier, animating the morphs was fairly straight forward as each morph slider could be keyframed, meaning that it was just a case of setting where I wanted each morph to start and stop.
I was originally going to have a transformation including the entire body, however as time went on I realised it would take too long to achieve, so I decided to just stick to the head.
The biggest part of getting the animation to look right was in the timing of the movement, as if it was either too slow or too fast it would make the transformation look unconvincing, therefore there was a lot of back and forth and tweaking involved to get the desired look. Also, importing and playing the animations in Unreal using Sequencer helped to double check the timing and how the end product would look which helped me to visualise what needed changing.
Below are all the head morphs that I created for the morph animation. I made sure to name them appropriate names as the Morpher modifier takes the name of the mesh you select as the morph, so if correct naming conventions aren't used, the morph list quickly gets confusing.
Most of the morphs were made in ZBrush, however some more basic ones were made in Max by just duplicating the mesh and using soft selection and the Shift brush found in the Freeform tools menu.
Here is a screenshot of the Morpher modifier being used to key the morph targets in my animation.
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