the toes are too splayed...but feet are something i suck at i usually do the old game look with a blocky one piece foot..

I stuck them apart for easier rigging if I ever decide on it (well, rigging is never easy but I try to ease it as much as possible). It has to do with them overlapping envelopes (grrr). Then again, I could just rig all the toes at once and don't worry about wiggling individual toes. Hmmm, a quick and dirty way out. *ponders the idea while stroking his goatee... and then strokes the goat*

My main problem is the shape of the heel and stuff. I had it narrower but it still didn't look right. Maybe if I put some pads on it. I need input from Leim since it's his feet. Maybe he should take a pic of his feet for reference. The ones I got don't really show the feet. Perhaps I slap some shoes on it. lol Nah, that'll be the easy way out. ^^~@~^^

well... your rigging in a bad way if having them splayed makes it easier...the reason would make them in the "rest position" is so the bend properly...in the way you have them they wont look right no matter what

Ah, but the envelope from bones overlap to the point that I can't select the right vertices to adjust the weights for. And if I reduce the envelope size, it goes under the "skin" of the model. It becomes a jumbled mess.

By having them apart, I can animate each toes (or finger) separately. Once rigged, I can move the offending body parts together and make that a key frame. If you notice, the all models to be rigged have their arms spread out. If I had the arms down the side, then parts of the torso would move when the arm does. That'll look freaky.

Despite all this, I going move the toes together and animate it all at once (if I even get to that point). I don't plan to "wiggle" each toe separately in this case. Just have all of the m curl at once and such (one big bone instead of 4 of them). Now the fingers I'll still have them apart so I can do things like pointing if I ever get that far.

As for the bending, I can adjust that with the Morpher Modifier. A common problem with joints is that they tend to collapse or "pinch" when then are at less than 90 deg bend. I seen this effect even in professional videos. 3ds max suggest manually adjusting the weights (which is a pain and could cause other nasty effects) or use the Morpher. I like the Morpher cause I get a nice clean and natural bending. But all this has to be done manually for every freaking joint. Since these are all know problems, there should be an automated (or semi-automated) way to "fix" these problems. But the only tools in max that I get is "adjust it manually". One would think that you can say "that's an arm and treat it as such unless I want to tweak it differently from the standard defaults".

That's why I'm going to look into these plugins that's supposed to automate a lot of this so I can focus on the "good stuff" and not the tedious "fixes". I already looked into the CAT plugin and it helps somewhat (almost there except it does terrible wings). I got another plugin to look at called Puppetshop that shows some promise.

Well, enough rambling. I'm sure your eyes are bleeding by this point. *hands over a towel* ^^~@~^^

:: waggles his paw at you:: first off the legs and arms are splayed, not for simplicity of modeling but because thats where they need to be inorder for the bends to work properly.


Second, when activating a bone system with physique theres a button you should un-check. Its called "use Evelopes" envelopes are good for one thing... long tubes that need to be quickly animated

and morpher is good when used as intended all your doing for yourself is making it much more involved and much more complicated where all of it could have been avoided by making the toes in thier rest position... or atleast in the "im not broken" position....

^_^;;

But I can't get the toes to rig if they are touching each other. I must separate or I'll have to adjust tons of vert weights. I have no problem bending, it's the thousand of weights that gets me. If I can force the envelope to stay right at the surface of the model and not go outside and "touch" other parts, I'll be golden. But it doesn't and it "pulls" on other verts it should have. It's right in the max's built-in tutorials. If there's another method, max sure don't mention anything about it (I gone through the thing all the way through). I have no idea why they would hide it. I try to go by max's examples.

I going to put the toes together on this model since I don't plan to individually animate them. But on my dragon model, I plan to do it individually. They are slightly spade at rest anyway, although they can go much wider to grasp stuff.

Hopefully all this is going away when I try out Puppetshop. If it's better than CAT, then I'll be happy. CAT is ok but I could get the wing to work like they should. CAT treats them like arms that's synced with the walk cycle. Makes it hard to flap at a different rate than the arm movements. I either get rapid flaping or jerky limb movements.

Differently sized toes maybe?
And definitely a smaller heel... right now it looks a bit like he's standing on stumps with rubber gloves glued to them. x-x

Yeah, I was thinking of that this morning. But just slightly smaller heels and toes. I don't want to go too much like a human. A cross between a paw and feet. Just haven't found the right combination yet. I'm planning on something similar to what  donamer does but with 4 toes. He seems to be an "expert". lol. But I need input from  leim . *poke poke* More human or animal? *poke poke* ^^~@~^^

Come to think of it, they actually look like monkey feet. lol.

yeah they kinda do look like monkey feet but you'll get them right different toe size and a more narrower heel may pull it off

I think the problem might be that they are a little short and kinda flat and boxy... I dunno, though. Feet isn't exactly my are of expertise. X3 And isn't the top part of a foot not supposed to be flat? Otherwise you end up with stumps with gloves... *chuckles*

Ok, longer with a higher instep. An update sometime tomorrow if I can get to it.

Keep in mind that this is just a guess. If it ends up looking more like crap, don't keep it. XD