Alternatives to Biped?

Mark Dygert

At work we've been using 3ds Max and Biped and a mix of facial bones and morph targets. We have some down time between games and we're researching alternatives to Biped as well as tweaking our pipeline. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for character rigging/animation alternatives, preferably 3ds max compatible.

Needs:
- Facial animation capable of lip sync and emotions, using either bones morph targets or a combo of both.
- Hand animations 5 fingers with 3 digits a piece.
- Humanoid players only, no need for crazy custom skeletons.
- Editable curves, for every object.
- Export animation to LUA, XML, or some kind of text/excel friendly format.

Wish list:
- Preferably all animation controls in one work flow/program. Right now we use a mix of Max Bones and Biped, Biped doesn't copy/paste max bone data.
- Copy/paste poses, would be great if this included facial bones and or morph data.
- Save/Load animations or motion capture.

MoP

Max's standard Bones stuff can copy/paste poses and save/load animations. Might import motion capture too, never tried though.

kary

The two that come to mind are CAT from Softimage http://www.softimage.com/products/cat/whats_new.aspx (seems odd that Soft bought a max plugin ) and Puppetshop, http://www.lumonix.net/puppetshop.html Not sure if Puppetshop hits those features, but you could contact Kees Rijnen and he'd tell you.

There was a somewhat wide ranging, and moderately interesting, discussion at CGS here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=6&t=441066 It should cover all the available products if nothing else.

arrangemonk

what about cryptic ar?
i dont know really but these are just scriptet bones and morphs should work
http://www.crypticar.com/

hyrumark

Maybe check out Automatron too, it seems it's made with all standard max objects. But I don't see facial bones as part of the default setup. Maybe these could be added though.