CAT rig problem when motion layer enabled

outer

Hello polycount community,

Im getting a rather annoying problem that only seems to occur with my custom built cat rigs - the feet/legs part of my rig glitch/deform very oddly when I apply any motion layer. When using a prebuilt rig this dosnt happen, but when I make one from scratch it pops up. Im fairly new to rigging an using cat but I followed two different tutorial series to the letter and this is still happening.

Heres some pics to illustrate my problem

How it looks before animation layer is enabled



How it looks after an absolute layer is enabled :poly134:



How it looks with catmotion layer enabled :poly127:

outer

Have I posted this in the right section? In dire need of some help, surely someone here has some CAT bombs they can drop?

Mark Dygert

I like the idea of CAT, or at least being able to set up highly customized rigs quickly. I liked it before autodesk bought it and included it. It had its issues but it was at least functional. But ever since then, the more they try to integrate it and update it, they end up breaking it.

• We won't use it in production because its been so unstable.
• We had problems importing and working on files saved in older versions.
• We had problems with the twist bones not animating when in FK mode...
• The align tool doesn't work with scaled CAT bones, so good luck trying to get a simplified skeleton to follow a CAT rig that had scaling.
• Exporting animation and transferring back and forth between rigs requires chicken feet and rain dances.
• Characterizing a CAT rig in Motion Builder is an exercise in futility, forget about getting motion back onto a CAT rig.
• They broke the rig/mesh resizer and haven't bothered to fix it yet.
• Even some of the rig presets are horribly broken, stay the hell away from their biped preset. We had problems with the arms just disappearing when we would hit undo, that is if undo didn't crash and corrupt the file.
• They introduced all kinds of instability with motion layers, I can't count how many times it crashed or broke other features.
• Pose mixer was broken, I'm not sure if they ever bothered to fix it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what we hit when we started using it. There weren't any work arounds for this stuff, there wasn't anything we did that we shouldn't have done to the rigs and all of it was waiting to be fixed by autodesk just so it would preform as expected, which we couldn't wait for, that was 2 years ago and most of it is still broken.

Our work around was to get the hell away from CAT and start making our own rigs.

It's like they don't have anyone to production test it and they completely ignore anyone who actually uses it. Its neat for messing around but way too unstable to actually relay on.

So my CAT experience leads me to say, run RUN away from CAT.