3DS Max CAT Rigging

Today, I have made a short 2 part series on CAT rigging (total Length is about 25 minutes).  This series is meant for those who are new to CAT and want to learn how to create a basic CAT structure for a humanoid.  Enjoy!

Part 1

Part 2

Maya: Putting an Image Sequence on a Plane for 3D Rotoscoping References

Lots of folks use the built-in image plane feature in Maya and apply an image sequence to it when needing to reference a movie.  I do something similar to that, but I use a regular plane instead and make my image sequence a reference.  I like doing this more because there are many cases where I am capturing multiple angles of footage or need the freedom to fully move or rotate the plane around in 3D space, the built-in image plane doesn't give me that kind of freedom.  I am going to assume that readers of this post are already familiar with Maya and do not need fundamental introductions, and that users already have image sequences created, so we will skip right to adding the image sequence to Maya.
To start, you will need an image sequence.  Maya does take regular AVI or MOV files, but those file types tend to have more issues when scrubbing through the timeline which you will be doing often.
Place your image sequences within your project folders in Maya, the sourceimages folder is a fine place for them.

Next load whichever scene you want in Maya.  Create a regular plane and position it wherever you'd like, since you are using a plane you can resize it or position it again at any time if necessary.  Once you have finished placing your plane, assign a new material to it by holding right click and selecting Assign New Material.

Select Surface Shader because we do not want lighting and shading conditions to effect the reference by default.

Next, select your the Attribute of your Surface Shader in the Attributes Menu.  Then select the Out Color option box.

The Create Render Node window will automatically pop up.  Select File.

Your file attribute should now show up in your Attributes window.  Browse for your image sequence by selecting Image Name.

Browse for your image sequence and select the first image.  From here press Open.

Navigate back to your Attributes window and check Image Sequence.

Once that is finished, you will find that your image sequence is applied to the plane, but the graphics are low quality or blurry.  Increase then render quality by going to Renderer>High Quality Rendering  in your viewport.

before

after

If you scrub through your timeline you should notice that your image sequence renders frame by frame on your plane.

Lastly, you may notice that your image sequence is not perfectly sized to your plane it means that your plane is not sized in the same ratio that your images are.  You can either create a new plane with the correct ratio and reapply your existing image sequence material which takes seconds to do.  Or you can navigate back to your Attributes menu and go to polyplane, turn off normalization and resize the height and width to match what you want.  This second method may be best for many users because you will often be using image sequences for reference in creating animations for an object or character and your object/character is most likely going to be in a different ratio than your reference.