Animation Mixing in 3dsMax?

I'd like to learn how to mix animations in 3dsMax in the same way that you might do in a game engine. IE: When you want a character to run and shoot at the same time, you might have the bottom half of the body play a run animation and the top half of the body play a shooting animation. Now I'm fairly ok with modelling, but animation in Max is still mostly all Greek to me, but this seems like something it can probably do. I'm just not sure how, what feature I should be looking at or what term I should be googling.

Any help anyone can give - even if it's just the name of the feature I need to be googling - would be much appreciated. A link to a tutorial on the subject would be even better.

To copy animation frames and move them around and what not you use the graph editors, Curve Editor and Dope Sheet. If you are wanting to get this sort of mix and match animation in-game however that's a code thing, not about something in 3ds max.

Don't know what it's called in Max but in Blender it's the NLA (Non Linear Animation) Editor where you can merge different animations exactly as you describe. Maybe google for that and see what Max comes up with.

Blender's .b3d exporter can even export a new animation based on the merged results. Very cool.

No, that's just my point. I know it can be a code thing, but it's a pointless overhead to do it in realtime when I only need it for a handful of animations. If it can be done in code, it can be done in a modeller.


Non linear animation, eh? Well when I google that for 3dsMax I seem to be getting a lot of hits mentioning Motion Flow and Motion Mixer. There's not much information, just those features, so I think I'll have a play with Max and see if either of them looks like it can do what I want.

Yeah, it's a shame I'm not using Blitz3D or I could just use Blender for these animations and be done with it. But I have to export to TVA at the end of it, so I have to stick with Max.

Motion Mixer, I just looked it up, that's what you want for providing Non Linear Animation in MAX. Hopefully it doesn't require another expensive module purchase to work ;-)

I'll shut up now.

Thanks Ardee, indeed Motion Mixer does sound like what I need. The docs are not overly helpful in relation to it, so I think I'm going to find a nice video tutorial on motion mixer and buy that to teach me the fundamentals. Thanks again, I hadn't a clue what to look for until you explained.

yeah, motion mixer works a lot like adobe video editing software (if your familiar with that).

You have multiple mixer tracks and you can overlap animation blocks and things to mix them just like in video editing.

The Motion Mixer used to be a character studion only feature but in 2006 they made it compatible with all 3dsmax animation which is nice :).

@Ardee There aren't really any extra plugins needed for max anymore, used to be like that 4-5 years ago. They integrated all the good ones in order to keep the higher price somewhat valid. So you get character studio, mental ray, plus they bought up and integrated many of the more usefull plugins that used to be third party e.g. Power booleans.