Game Character Animation in Max
polycounter lvl 18
I'm wondering what tools are being used nowadays in studios if they're animating for games in 3dsmax? (Maya seems much preferred I know) Is it still old biped and skin? Is CAT worth learning? It seems buggy. Starting a project and biped is all I know, have the feeling the world has passed me and biped by...
Replies
I prefer it over plain bones because of the tools I use, copy/paste poses, loading animations etc. It also works with Unity very well, and I don't need muscles and all that jazz.
It's also very fast for me to weight characters with biped because of this script that I can't recommend enough: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/autoweight-automatic-skinning-tool-for-3ds-max
If I had time I would probably look into CAT...digital tutors has an intro course on it that's about 2.5 hours. Beyond that, I know a lot of modern game use custom rigs. But for me, I need the speed of what I already know--including the quirks and bugs of biped that I already know how to deal with.
On the surface CAT seems to be great it has a lot of flexibility it operates in ways people expect and it uses the standard curve editor as is without having to customize it. BUT we stopped using it in production because it was so buggy and broken, ever since Autodesk bought it, it's become crazy unstable. The only people that seem to like it now are people that watch videos, mess around with it for 10min and then never really use it.
Biped
Biped is pretty much rock solid as it's ever been. The only people who don't like it don't take the time to understand it. There are some really old reasons to dislike biped but they took care of those 3-4 releases ago. There are only a few remaining minor issues and they are easy to work around if you know about them. To get rid of them they would have to destroy a lot of bipeds core features so it's just not worth it.
Most of the people who hate on biped are Maya guys who love to hate on Max in general. They will google biped hate threads from 2002-2008 and recycle the reasons (that have been addressed). They also rave about HumanIK, which operates almost exactly like biped, but with some expanded pinning, full body IK and re-targeting features, but animating it is pretty much identical to biped. Point that out and they either warm up to biped or start crapping all over HumanIK, heh.
Bone Rigs
A traditional rig is great, if you have the time to set it up, maintain it and build some expanded features that are starting to become standard. Which is not an easy task. It takes a lot of technical know how and often requires some degree of programming skill to pull off.
Which rig you use depends on what you want to do as a job.
If you want to be a rigging/skinning technical artist...
No one is going to take you seriously until you start creating your own rigs and tools. But then you start to venture away from the animation skill set and your resume starts looking more like a technical artist. VERY few studios will hire a rigger/TA who only knows how to use a pre-made system like CAT or Biped. If the person is a kick ass animator and they need someone to wear two hats they might go for it, but they would easily go for someone who can animate just as well but has more depth when it comes to rigging. Chances are they'll want weapons, vehicles and odd objects and creatures animated and they need someone capable of rigging it up.
If you want to be an animator...
Focus on animation. Get to know several different rigs, check out motion builder and how it operates, and give Maya a spin so you have some experience. That way you can handle whatever they will be using.
If you plan to be a one man show...
Doing rigging, skinning, tool writing and animating, is a lot of work and it's a lot of skills to stuff into one person. Quite a few studios fail to understand the different aspects of animation and end up hiring a jack of all trades who isn't really great at any one thing and it shows. You're skill set will have to be robust enough to handle it all and balancing the technical with the artistic is fairly difficult for a lot of people to do. Which is why most studios tend to break it up into separate jobs.
+1 but it's often worth the effort
( +1 to the reply from mark as well)
The project is a Unity3d iPhone game so only relatively simple rigs required. Mostly humanoid characters but likely a few animals and monsters which slightly worry me as I'm used to Biped's unique tools and haven't built custom bone rigs with IK etc.
My biggest gripe with Biped is it's curve editor which has always pained me. Do you have any advice for it Mark?
Memory - Have you used BonesPro? How would you say they compare?
Puppet Shop looks interesting, any users out there who can compare it to Biped?
I really like PuppetShop, we used it back when it was a paid-for script and we loved it. Its pretty much an automated way to create a standard rig with bones, plus a TON of really cool features (clip blending, layers, presets, ect...), they where really hard to break too, rock solid and I'd use it over CAT even if CAT worked as well as advertised.
As far as I know puppetshop was released into the wild for free about the time we went to CAT. We moved to CAT because we feared Puppetshop development was going to stop and we also had render farm issues, as well as trouble opening puppetshop saved files on machines that didn't have puppetshop, meshes and rigs would collapse into a ball...
The only downside to Puppetshop was learning it, they didn't have any written documentation. It was all in videos with overlaid text, so it was crazy trying to find something specific, there wasn't a way to search it. You couldn't even play the video and just listen, you had to watch the text in the video... it was brutal. I ended up taking a fuck ton of notes and writing my own documentation for us to use. But once you figured it out, it rocked!
But the lack of documentation and the steep learning curve make it hard for me to recommend to people.
Oh there was another downside, once you left setup mode there was no going back, it built the rig and it was set. If you wanted to go back you had to redo a lot of steps and transfer things over to a new rig. Which isn't impossible but with other rigs its not such a one way street.
BonesPro...
Is awesome, hands down. BUT everyone has to have it installed. It makes sharing files tough just like puppetshop, which is why we don't use it. If they ever included it in max I would be ALL over it. It makes skinning so much faster and the floating deformers are great.
The biped curve editor...
You can use "workbench" but you don't have to. I use the standard curve editor with the "Biped:Track View" toolbar out. That gives you access to the position tracks that where only previously available in workbench.
Biped got a bad rap for only working in TCB values for a really long time which made curve editing a pain, no handles. But they created an Euler option about 3-4 versions ago and its been great ever since.
If you're not comfortable using Quaternion then set the biped to Euler (standard curve handles). I actually animate in quaternion because it gets around gimbal lock and gives decent curves, but then I switch to Euler and fine tune the curves, so I'm weird...
I went over some of this in another post and was a bit more specific...
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1946939&postcount=4
The script that I linked to is just a tool that helps with weighting, but I've found it particularly successful. There is a youtube tutorial link on that page and it explains the workflow...maybe takes 2 minutes to understand. So you could give it a try even.
You should be good with biped, you can always add a bone or two to it.
Also SyaPed, where is Junkers? Lol.
Even in the same work setting its kind of crappy, unless you have a way to push it to everyone as part of a tools install or something.
Then if you update max you need to get an updated version of all the plugins, make sure they still work and pass that around so everyone gets it. It's a pain if you're on subscription and updating every April-ish when they release new updates, which we haven't done even though we are on subscription, ha.
There is another downside to BonesPro...
It isn't supported by any game engine that I know of. There might be ways to use parts of it (skin weighting) and transfer that over to something that does work and doesn't require a plug-in, but I don't think you will ever get the floating deformers or jiggle bones to work. Some engines have started to develop their own set of similar tools but they don't recognize bonesPro and set it up for you, its something you have to do in the engine with their tools.
Outside of those logistical setbacks, which aren't really its fault, it rocks. I really wish they would just snatch it up and include it in max, it would clear up all of the problems that people have with it. Also its just the kind of improvements max needs. If it was standard, there is a better chance more engines would start to support it. But its kind of a chicken & egg thing. Also they would get bashed for "not innovating on their own" and modelers would complain about more "useless bloated stuff" bla bla bla...
Memory - Junkers is lost in deep space I'm afraid