Biped vs Custom Rigging

#1 I believe Torque has expected the biped rig, though I'm not sure how the biped rig has changed over versions of Max.

#2 With Max it is better to use Biped.

I use Lightwave so i use a skeleton rig.

#3 It doesn't matter what bone system you use. Biped just gives you already properly linked bone system for a "human" kind object.

#4 You could us Torque skeleton if you want to use bones. Its set up in a human form for Max

#5 Id recommend using a custom rig. The plus of biped is that you can skin a character to it and automatically be able to use the dsq animations that gets shipped with torque. Beyond that, though, biped starts to become a roadblock. Its much easier to get the full power of the torque animation system with a custom rig than with biped. In my experience, anyway.

#6 Its personally preference really, or depends on what your doing.

Biped has some shortcuts that can make certain things easier, but it becomes restrictive in certain situations.

For instance biped has a lot of left to right copy and paste functions (or green to blue), custom rigs dont.
But Biped is setup a very defined way and sometimes when you want a different control setup it makes it very hard or impossible to do. I believe it has changed in the new max version but it used not to be any real use for non human characters.

#7 Has anybody any experience with Cryptic AR (www.crypticar.com/)?

#8 It really depends on how lazy you feel at the time if you ask me (and somewhat depending on what your requirements are).

Biped does indeed have some very nice features, the ability properly copy sets of animation over from one setup to another (completely different one) is quite handy if you have to do that. Doing that stuff with a custom rig is very, very painful.

In other situations I definitely prefer using custom stuff though, especially when non-humanish things are being animated.


And nope, haven't tried Cryptic AR yet, it's on the "todo" list...

#9 Puppetshop is also another great solution (www.lumonix.net). Blows away CAT and its far more cost effective.

But really there are multiple ways to skin the cat and Torques DTS/DSQ system is so dammed robust any of them will work.

#10 i'm glad to have found this thread. i was a little concerned i would be limited to Biped (it feels a little clunky to me) as opposed to making a fresh rig.

though, for custom rigs, can the engine handle stretchy bone solutions and skin-morphs?

#11 stretchy bone solutions - if you mean scaling then yes

skin-morphs? - no

#12 Torque's Bone system consists of skin weighting, and that's about it. Each vertex has X% influence from joint1, y% influence from joint2 etc.

As a rule of thumb - anything that can be baked in can show up in torque. Anything that relies on timeline functionality will not. If you can pose the character in the position you want and can take a snapshot for 1 frame, then move the frame around on the timeline and it still holds up, then torque will be able to interpret it.

Anything real-time will need extensive simulation programming (physX, whathaveyou).