3ds Max Tutorials Chapter 10

Hierarchies

Here you can see the full hierarchy of the model on the left side of the image. Each child is nested under the appropriate parent, that way so if you affect the parent in some way, all of its children are affected appropriately. however, if you do something to the child, it will not affect the parent.






















In these next two images you can see that there is a difference between rotating something on the gimbal and on the local.
with the gimbal, the only rotate attribute thats value is changed is the one that you have selected, however on local, it affects the other two axis's values as well. This will cause a problem for us later on when we start animating. When rotating something that is attached to a parent, always use gimbal.

In the video I showed how the axis don't all always move in gimbal mode. That's because each axis is assorted in the hierarchy so that one is the parent of the other two, and the one below that is only the parent of the last one.  you can change the order that they are parented in here.

This video shows how to link objects together in 3ds Max to parent or child objects to each other in the hierarchy.


Here is an example of what the hierarchy looks like in schematic view.

In this image I show you how to lock certain aspects of a transform of an object so that they can not be affected and their values can not be changed. This is useful for animating, especially when it comes to things like knees and elbow, which only rotate on one axis.






Here is a before and after picture. In the image on the left you can see that the torso is way too small, its actually half the size that it needs to be. To fix this I scaled it up 200%. but this created a problem, as you can see, when  I rotated the head after doing this, it is having some undesired affects on the model, this is because the scale of its parent has changed on the z axis. There are a couple of ways that we can fix this. One is resetting the x-Form.


You can see here that the z scale transform is at 200, while the others are at 100. If we want the children of this object to behave the way we expect them to, all of these scale transform values need to be at 100. We can do this by resetting the X form.







Here is where it is locate in the tools (third from the bottom) all we have to do is have the correct object selected, and then select that option. This will put it on the modifier stack. We can then "bake" the object by converting it to a poly an this will cause all the transforms of the object to be set to normal values.










See!

















The other way of fixing this is by scaling it on a sub-object level. Here is a brief video that shows you how to do this.

Yay!! It is fixed!