Page 999 - Kitab3DsMax

Chapter 39: Animating with CAT and Creating Crowds
FIGURE 39.3
Increasing the number of bone segments allows the bone to twist like this forearm.

Using custom meshes
The bones that make up a CAT rig by default are simple box objects. This allows them to move quickly
with a minimum amount of lag, but the bones don’t need to be overly simple. The power of modern com-
puters allows complex scenes to be animated without any lag. If you select a bone and enable the Use
Custom Mesh option in the Setup rollout, you can access and modify the existing bone to be more repre-
sentative of the mesh.
To edit an existing bone, simply apply a modifier to the bone object or an Edit Poly modifier and edit the
bone as you wish. You also can attach another mesh to the Edit Poly modifier. Once editing is done, simply
collapse the changes to the base bone object, and then you can switch back and forth between normal box
bones and the custom mesh using the Use Custom Mesh option. Figure 39.4 shows the preset for a gnou.

Tip
If you’ve gone to all the trouble of building a skin mesh, then you can quickly use the same skin mesh as the skele-
ton by stripping down its details and using it as a custom mesh. n

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