As i have mentioned before we are switching to Motion Builder as an animation tool here, and i was wondering what the preferred methods of rigging were for Motion Builder.
Obviously biped has somewhat of a decent pre-existing template that can be easily doctored to actually work with all of the roll bones and toe placements. But i have been investigating cat as an alternative rigging system. I was hoping to move away from biped in all together and go directly to cat, but thought i would see if anyone knows of any limitations in using cat for motion builder bone hierarchies. Another option of course is to just generate bones, and not mess with a rigging system at all inside max. This would limit us to using motionbuilder only for animation, but we will be exporting directly from there eventually so might not be such a bad thing.
From what i understand motion builder isn’t to friendly with non quadruped\bipedal rigs so we would still be using max to animate those characters.
I should rephrase, do you think that it would be advantageous to keep some sort of animation ability inside max? Or should we force a full motionbuilder pipeline and keep all animation done in Mobu
What ever you use to create the joints, you can always drive that “Skin export skeleton” by cat, biped, mobu etc…
Test Cat, if FBX export can convert the cat objects to joints then your good, I have never done this.
There are always going to be times where it will be a better way to rig in max/maya for some rigs but that is going to be up to you as the TD what you want to support. Cat looks like a great pairing with Motionbuilder since it has layers, custom rig design etc…
In short, build skeleton with what ever you want and you will still have the option to animate in max if needed.
While I was still at Bioware, we did a lot of Puppetshop <-> MotionBuilder (Back then Filmbox I believe…).
So it works.
Puppetshop can import Character Studio BVH files directly onto the human rig, so if you export from Motion Builder to Character Studio format BVH, it should import in Puppetshop onto the standard human.
I’m sure cat could do the same, but I never tried.