Character with animation controls
A games character can be made up of different objects linked together into a hierarchy, or it can be made of a single continuous surface.
When a character is all one object, you can use a skeleton of bones to create the animation of the character. You animate the bones, and then use this movement to deform the character mesh. You can animate the bones by moving and rotating them individually, or inverse kinematics controls.
The link between the bones and the mesh is the Skin modifier.
In this tutorial you will you see how bones are created for a continuous-surface character. You will apply a Skin modifier to the new bones and adjust the envelopes. You will also apply inverse kinematic controls for animating the bones.
Most of the tutorials ask you to begin by loading a starting file. You will find these files in the subdirectories under gmax\tutorials. These scene and map files are not installed as part of the basic gmax install. You get these files when you download and install gmax_tutorials.exe. If you can't find a file, trying searching for it using Windows Explorer or My Computer; you may have inadvertently installed the files to a different location.