[Question] Animate with bone/ biped?
What do you guys usually use to animate for games? i have characters human & animal to animate & put in to "Unity" engine
Is it better to do bones/ biped since it already put an IK setup for the human char?
any pro/ cons for each??
thx
Is it better to do bones/ biped since it already put an IK setup for the human char?
any pro/ cons for each??
thx
Replies
PuppetShop (its free now)
Great rig, does animals & insects as well as humans really well. It's very customizable, so having a character with 8 arms is as easy to set up as a character with 2. Comes with a few standard rigs, human, spider, horse, lizard, very easy to set up and save your own. Also it's clips manager is pretty great, and the way it handles layers make it easy to keep all of your animations in one file.
Biped
Great rig, not as customizable but you can tack on extra bones. It's real strength comes in its copy paste poses, planted keys, use of motion mixer and easy mo-cap clean up. It's worth mentioning that Motion Mixer has been expanded to include regular objects such as bones and boxes. It has its limitations when working that way but is pretty effective.
Custom bone rigs
Get ready for some headaches, trial and error and quite a bit of scripting. Become familiar with Animation > Bone Tools, constraints and IK/FK, it will help, a lot.
My personal preference starts with biped for humans, PuppetShop for creatures and custom bones for very simple things.
If you are new to animating or working on a VERY small project, use Biped. Those are the ONLY circumstances I will EVER recommend Biped, because it does those things quite well.
EDIT: I take that back. Just don't use Biped if you've never used it before. It lives in its own world and animates differently than everything else. It is going out of style, anyway. Just use PuppetShop.
Biped's real problems are lack of extensibility, bugs, and pipeline. If you are working on a larger project, use PuppetShop, hands down. Slightly more 'technical' than Biped in setup, but animating with it is just as good for 'default' stuff, and it gives you an infinite degree greater flexibility in everything. And I've not run into a rig-breaking bug with it yet, other than the IK bug in Max 9 and later (nothing to do with PS).
You should be able to use PS to rig anything. If you can't build it with Puppetshop's default stuff, you can create your own custom setup and add it to a PuppetShop rig (there is a video tutorial for this). That'll give you things like layers, blending, multiple timelines, etc. It makes it fully integrated in the PS rig.
Some friends animators always say to me, "if you are going to animate in max, use CAT".
I agree that Puppetshop while infinity easier to animate with and easily the animators choice of rigs, it can be a bit of a technical monster when someone is first getting used to it. After you get over the hump its easy to see how great it is. I do think PuppetShop is easier to learn if you've already used a rig like Biped or the CrypticAR. CrypticAR is very easy to use, but lacks a lot of the technical features of PuppetShop and biped that make them so great.
There is another drawback to working with PuppetShop and that is because it wasn't written in cooperation with Autodesk certain features had to be written in very specific ways that slows them down and ties down their functionality a tiny bit. If it ever gets written into 3ds and get a tiny graphical update it will be unstoppable in replacing biped.
If you want simple, easy to understand, hardly any fuss or fluff, go with CrypticAR.
If you want some advanced features like layers, mo cap clean up, copy/paste poses, planted keys, working with motion clips and don't want to install any plug-ins go with Biped.
If you want all that biped offers and you want a highly customizable rig, along with rock solid performance, that is much easier to animate, but has a bit of a steep learning curve, go with PuppetShop.
Personally if our pipeline wasn't dependent on biped we'd probably be using PuppetShop for everything. Now that its free, I'm positive it will be more widely used. At some point might even be rolled into 3dsmax along side biped much like Edit Mesh and Edit Poly.
I've used biped before. But I'm not sure how or if it exports data into Unity. Steep learning curve (particulary when you edit your keys) but once you get the hang of it you can get close to mocap quality animation very fast.
& it doesn't take puppetshop unless it converted t bones.
so now i must try all, & see which 1 fit best to Unity without error.
thx all for the input (didn't know about puppetshop before, looks like a great tool)
thx