long story short. Need to staple a biped's left hand onto the foreend of a pump action shotgun, that is linked to the biped's right hand. I remember people laughing at me about not being able to do that back in 1999 with Max 3, by missing the anchor button, and since I have used it. now at the new job I use Max 8, and the interface in biped about IK blending (which now has a new definition) to objects seems to be gone, or hidden. It's been three years since I have used Max so it's a bit... Um.. stressfull :-). Can one still Stple the left hand to a gun held in the right?

Scott

i dont know a ton about biped, but how I would do it in maya, would be create a dummy object, and then link that to the shotty, then point constrain the L hand to the dummy, then move the dummy till the hands grips the foreend.
should work...

I wish I was using Maya for this, because then I'd sort of know what to do (Beg the TD for a decent skeleton, the put the constraint on the shotgun as you said. :-)) But no, this is max.

Scott

Okay, found it, and I pass it along to folks that may need it.

1.) Pick a Biped Bone and click the little wheel at the top of the side panel.

2.) go down until you see the "KeyInfo" tab. Open it up.

3.)Below the key icons there is a list of Options.
+TCB ----------
+IK -----------
+Head ---------
+Body ---------
+Prop ---------

4.) hit the plus next to IK.

5.) Hit Select Pivot. then hit H, and pick the Hand bone.

6.)Select the radio button that says Object, and then pick that. (in this case the slide for the pump action).

7.) check the box that says [_] Join to Previous IK Key.

8.)Dial the IK Blend valute up to one.

9.) then animate.

The order may be wrong, but I can ask for clarification.

Scott

hahaha you're too fast, I was just about to type that up. I just used this a month ago to get a suffer to wax her board.

yup thats how you do it, or at least how the book "3ds Max Animation with Biped" told me how to do it.

You don't need to "select pivot" if you have the hand selected already and I'm not sure what the "Join Previous IK Key" check box does. I have never checked it. Maybe its for if you already have keys set and are linking after you have done some animation work? I set this up before doing any animating so I guess its ok to leave it unchecked... /shrug.

Yeah I had a walk cycle and a gunless idle done befroe I did that. But it worked.

So is there then a way to "bake the Keyframes" as there is in Maya, so that when I remove the gun (there are going to be a number of guns that have to snap to the players right hand), so that the left hand retains it's proper orientation even when the gun is removed?

Scott

Scott