Creating a radius and ulna bone in your arm rig.
 

Step 1
This setup will give us a realistic twisting motion in the forearm, closely simulating the radius and ulna bones. We'll start by using the arm rig from the last lesson. But this time the forearm bone will be used as part of the IK chain only, not for skinning purposes.

Select the forearm bone and nub (Bone02 and Bone03 if you followed the last lesson).

Step 2
I'll be referring to bones and helpers by their default names as they're created in Max. So follow along the directions one at a time and our names will match.

Make two copies of these bones.

Step 3
Select Bone06 (the larger bone, not the little bone) and move it just to the right of Bone02.

Step 4
Select Bone08 (the bigger one again) and move it to the left. These will represent the radius and ulna bones in your arm. The radius is the bone on the same side of your arm as the thumb, and the ulna is on the same side as your pinky. But since this could be either a left or right arm it doesn't matter which is which right now.

Step 5
Now add a Point helper.

Step 6
Now we'll align it to Bone02. Click on the Align button.

Step 7
And set up the Align window the way you see below. Basically, we're placing this Point helper at the base of Bone02 and aligning it's rotation with the bone at the same time.

Step 8
Link the radius and ulna bones (Bone06 and Bone08) to the point helper (Point01) we just created.

Step 9
We need to create IK chains for the radius and ulna bones. Select Bone09, go into the Animation menu, IK Solvers, and select HI Solver. Select the main bone of this hierarchy (Bone08) as the end of the chain.

Step 10
Do the same thing to with Bone07 and Bone06.

Step 11
Now we need to link both of these new IK Goals to the main IK Goal for the arm, IK Chain01.

Step 12
A couple more bits of linking and we're done. Link both the radius and ulna bones (Bone06 and Bone08) to the elbow point helper (Point01).

Step 13
And link Point01 to the upper arm bone (Bone01).

Step 14
If you've done everything correctly up to this point (and I've written the instructions right), you should be able to grab the main IK Goal object and use it to both, move the arm and rotate the hand. You'll also notice that as you rotate it the tops of the radius and ulna bones rotate right along with it, while the bottoms, near the elbow, stay put. And that's pretty much how the real radius and ulna bones work.

I've hidden the nonessential items so that it's easier to see what's going on.

Step 15
And just so you know, the reason we added the point helper at the elbow and attached the radius and ulna bones to it is so that those bones will rotate correctly when you use the Swivel Angle or the dummy helper object to reorient the arm.

Step 16
If you run into problems take a look below and see how all the objects are linked together. I added a more descriptive name to end of the item name so it's easier to tell what's what.

Also, once you get it working properly you can do a little housecleaning by hiding all the bones not highlighted in red. The highlighted bones and helpers are the important one that you either use to animate with, or use for skinning bones.

While this looks good and acts like real bones while you're looking at the bones, it's actually kind of difficult to get it looking good when you add the model and skin the arm to the bones. The arm tends to lose volume between the wrist and the elbow as the wrist turns. The exception to this is if you're using a muscle system like Absolute Character Tools which will help to retain the volume.

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