Hi guys, we are currently evaluating CAT Tools and how they will fit into our pipeline for our next project. To give you some background, the project will be heavily reliant on motion capture and so motionbuilder will be used as the base for our animation. However we will need more work on the animation to be done in another mainstream 3D package (max, maya). As weve always used max in the past, it seemed to make sense to push forward with it. CAT Tools which is intergrated into max 2010 seemed a favourable option, and the artists and animators have had quite a bit of success getting their heads around it. However, we have started to run CAT Tools through the pipeline, and already I have run into problems.
We will be processing a large number of animations and so we will need the option to run a maxscript to batch potentially up to, and over 100 FBX animation files at a time. I have been able to create a script that can do this on a custom rig, but Iam having difficulty finding anyway of doing it on a CAT rig.
It seems you cant import FBX files directly onto the CAT rig, rather you have to import the FBX file into the scene as a merge, and then manually point the CAT rig to the merged rig using the capture animation feature. This works fine if we need just a few animations, but manually doing this on up to a hundred animations everytime we need to re-export a skeleton just isnt feasable.
There is some Maxscript features in the CAT help section, but nothing it seems where I can map animations between rigs automatically using Maxscript.
I guess Im asking if any of you guys have ran a simular pipeline, and what problems/advantages you have found. Also it would be good to know if you have scripted CAT Tools before and how you have found it in a full scale production pipeline.
Thanks Guys.
Andrew.