New to max and trying to find our best solution for rigs. Coming form Maya I’m used to building what I need one bone at a time, and I’m ramping up on Max bones. But CAT seems like a powerful (and fast/easy) option. I’m not usre if it wil meet our needs
-strict joint budget (<40 per character)
-attach prop joints
-modular aniamtion -one rig to drive many meshes
-attach custom 'secondary ’ skeletons for complex characters (like an angel = human rig plus extra wing rig)
-plays nice with fbx
Maybe I’m just wary of CAT because so many have warned me about Biped…
Depending on the types of characters you need to rig, CAT should be fine. You may want to look into PuppetShop as well. However, you may not be able to come across PuppetShop any longer since Kees joined Autodesk. Additionally, Biped, despite its reputation, is not that bad. It has a ton of built-in features that you would otherwise have to roll your own or cobble together tools that exist out on the net. All of these options allow you to do most of what you need including adding custom secondary joints on top of them. Biggest question is who is animating it and will they be comfortable with the choice. If its mostly mocap work most of these will handle it just fine. You just need to determine what the workflow is.
Biped isn’t that bad if all you use is biped (plus, most Max animators have used it)
Getting data out of if that looks like the data from default max, on the other hand, stinks – it’s in a different coord sys from the rest of Max and a lot of things you’d like to know (‘how bent is that elbow?’ ) have to be derived by roundabout methods. And if you are doing stuff with nonstandard anatomy it’s no help.
Cat would be better than Biped at least in the newer version of Max 2013+. Biped, while tolerable only for animation in pinch (I only say this because some animators only have ever used it), but if you have any need for motion capture don’t use it. If the motion capture will be delivered to you from an outside vendor or you want the time spent on capture to not be a waste of money, then under no circumstances use biped.
How is it a waste of money you might be thinking? First Biped and Biped rigs are limited in the way the rig moves, has bones in less than ideal places for re targeting human motion on to, has issues with getting motion capture data on to it while keeping the shoulders and elbows the same as the source data, it goes on. So you spend lots of money to capture the moves, pay for clean up and high detail data and then it gets trashed loading on to Biped. It is like taking a really nice high resolution picture and then compress and shrink it down to a blurry mess then trying to print it and expect it to look good.
Cat is a more flexible system, has improved compatibility with MotionBuilder and is a more modern rigging system that won’t trash your data.
which seems to imply that you cannot directly export a CAT animation as FBX,
but you must implement a transitional rig to copy he CAT animation onto, to reduce it to position/ rotation/scale data only
this would appear to make CAT pretty cumbersome for limited game animation.
Rob Galanakis’ response inthis thread is also starting to scare me away from CAT.
I need to produce fairly streamlined FBX animations…
I am beginning to think CAT may be a dead end/overkill for our project.
Yes Robs post is good and I agree but not everyone can or will go that route. Sometimes though you just have to work with the tech that is available and CAT while not perfect does have a much improved workflow from the video you found.
Only you can know what your project needs, based on what you have posted here so far though, I would still recommend you evaluate Cat with a proper test.
I’m in the same boat… I moved from Maya to a studio that uses Max and CAT, and it has issues.
While good for quickly getting characters rigged, and it does have some nice layering, pose and clip tools, it can wig out if you try to modify it too much. We hit a ‘#QNAN’ positional data issue that sends parts of the rig flying off to infinity at random times… its a pretty basic rig edit, but it’s impossible to repro.
Another thing to consider is you are completely beholden to autodesk if something is busted. For instance the ik/fk match wasn’t working in the first few patches for 2013, then in update six they fixed it, however something in the animation transfer/layer system was now broken - that was previously working fine - so we had to roll back. Communications can go dead with them when your asking for info on when something will be fixed.
While most issues have workarounds and nothing stops work dead, it can be a real pain to live with. For both animators and TA’s (Trying to fix stuff in a closed source system inevitably leads to tons of ‘band aid’ fixes) There’s a strong consensus in our team to move away from CAT.
I like the ‘idea’ of cat and some of its implementation, however, unless your sure you’l stick to the confines of the box it lays out to you, you may regret choosing it for production.
I’ll always suggest having an FK (Dummy/Locator) rig that is skinned to and is driven by the underlying rig, whether CAT or Biped. Then you can export your animation from that rig.