Mastering Autodesk 3ds Max 2013

Chapter 13

Rigging for Animation

In the previous chapters, you learned how you can animate simple scene objects to create lighting effects, walkthroughs, and time-lapse animations and to park a car in front of the villa. You can use those lessons as the basis to create many different types of animation in 3ds Max. Many times, however, you will need to animate more complex assemblies or scene objects. Autodesk^® 3ds Max 2013^® offers a number of comprehensive systems that allow for the animation of complex assemblies through the use of hierarchies, that is, parent-child relationships that let groups of objects be animated as a single object. The hierarchies can be animated both through forward and inverse kinematics.

In this chapter, you'll create ...