Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

In this lesson, we'll correct the deformations of the wrist. So let's add some animation to our control. On frame 10, we'll go ahead and rotate it up. And then on frame 20, we can rotate it down. All right, so it looks pretty problematic here. Looks like he's got a flailing arm. But let's go ahead and take a closer look at what's happening. Let's go ahead and select the envelope of the elbow. And as we can see, it has a lot of influence on that wrist. But if we start to bring this point back, we should see this area looking better. And then from there we'd want to select the hand and do the same thing. Notice how much influence that has. But If we start to bring this back, so the influence is surrounding the hand, and not any part that should be affecting be the elbow, notice that it looks much better. And how fast we were able to do that. You've got to love the waiting tools in Max. Because they save us so much time. Now it's just a matter of going in and correcting a few areas. So with that, we can use our brush. I'll set this to one to kind of block this out and choose that harder brush. Go in and start to add some weight to it, to the wrist bone. Careful not to add any influence to any points that should be affected by the thumb. OK, so from here we can start to smooth this area out a little bit more. I'll head over back to the brush, set this to about 0.1, start to add some influence back and we'll smooth out the brush. I'd also like to mention that if you'd like to remove any weight, simply put in a value of negative, so negative 1 to remove a weight fully. I'll bring that back to 0.1 and get right to it. OK, that looks pretty good. From here we can go ahead and add some influence back to the elbow. So I'll turn off the brush, select the elbow's envelope. Careful not to select any points. We'll go ahead and start to sort smooth out this area. And as we do, we start to bring some volume back. And again, in the course that follows this, we teach how to create twist bones to really get that volume back in the wrist as we twist our control. And I'll show you what I'm talking about as we finish up here. OK, I'd say that looks pretty good. So we'll call that done. Now if we were to go ahead and select our wrist control, go back to frame zero and just remove its animation. So notice if we were to go ahead and twist this in the x-axis, eventually we're going to run into some collapsing here. So the twist bones, they're set up in a way where we get that volume back and get a nice twist distribution down the forearm and upper arm. So I'll set that back to zero and we're just about done. We have a few more things. What we're going to do in the next lesson is go ahead and tweak the elbow area and the arm, get those going. Let's go ahead and check out the shoulder to see if there's anything to do here. Really, the shoulder looks great, so I'd say we can skip over that area. There might be a few spots that you may want to go back and just tweak. But looking at all of the tools that we looked at throughout this course, you know exactly how to do that. So just tweak those areas that you'd like to to get the envelope deformations that you're looking for. But again, that's going to finish up the wrist. And in the next lesson, let's say we finish up this left arm so that we can go ahead and focus on mirroring our weights, double checking a few things, and calling our control rig finished.