[QUOTE=robinb;1547]Can someone explain what the problem is with exporting bipeds directly? We’ve done that for several projects and haven’t hit any problems. Rob you mentioned them hiding non-uniform scaling. Is that an issue if we tried to use squash and stretch? We haven’t needed to do that for the previous projects, but might well do for the current one. I’ll have to run some tests before we get too far into it.[/quote]
Biped allows you (or used to allow you, maybe still does) to change the scale of bones, outside of figure mode (which isn’t applying scale). And because the Biped is hierarchical, when your engine interprets this data, it will be applying that scaling to bones further down the chain. The Biped, however, does not reflect this. If you try it with point helpers, you will see the shearing- with Biped, you won’t. Unless your engine is specifically set up to handle non-uniform scaling, you never want it in your rig, and you certainly don’t want your rig to hide it from you.
The animators we’ve used have produced good stuff with bipeds. I’m sure they’d prefer a nice standard bones rig, but they haven’t complained so far or taken too long.
I doubt they’d prefer a nice standard bones rig. While some of Biped is crap, it is really simple to animate with, and there are some good scripts and workflow tools available. I do know, however, that your pipeline would prefer a non-Biped solution, and it comes down to, is the pipeline time Biped adds worth building (and more importantly, maintaining) your custom rig solution. With any complex pipeline, yeah, it is probably worth it, but if you haven’t had any problems and don’t have people that have done it before, it is probably not a good thing to try- creating a rigging and animation pipeline from scratch when you have one that works already, will force whoever is doing it to have lots of moments when they re-examine their choices and will put their sanity to the test- it is really a high-stress endeavor.
You should be able to put an FK skeleton on top of CAT, no? Also, PS exports to Max bones (and will bring your skin modifier over and everything, etc.), so exporting is no problem. It also allows for custom export hierarchies that may be different from rigging hierarchies, etc.
It should also be noted, PuppetShop is written like 90% in MXS. The C++ stuff is only for things that need to be very fast. This means you are able to modify almost any of Puppetshop, except a few MSE files that are encrypted (and your company can buy source code). CAT is all in C++ AFAIK, with a few auxiliary scripts- this makes it much less exposed and much more difficult to work with. After the first month or so of using PuppetShop, I have really been able to add and script with it seamlessly, even creating my own integrated limb type (a dog leg which behaves like Biped’s, both IK and FK at the same time), and a ‘custom’ spiderleg that was added after rigging.
