The Face Machine and The Setup Machine 2: Any Good?
I love creating my own characters, and other people's characters in 3D, but I absolutely HATE rigging. I know how to rig, but not that well, and I've only had one class that taught me how to create my own custom rig...and it was taught by possibly the worst professor in the world...so I need more practice with rigging, which means more school. I'm going to graduate next month with my Bachelor's degree, and I'm thinking about going for the Master's after this. Hopefully, I'll learn enough about rigging during that time to fill in the gaps from what I've learned so far, so I'll be able to rig my own characters by myself. Until then, I still really want to be able to rig my characters, so I'm thinking about asking for The Face Machine and The Setup Machine 2 for my birthday, which is coming up on the 24th of this month.
Before I ask for it, though, I want to know if it's any good. I need to know if it can handle geometry imported from 3D Max, and how well it works with animal ears, tails and other non-human anatomy bits. I also need to know if it handles quadrupeds well, or even things like mermaid tails...stuff like that. If you have any of these pieces of software and know what it can do, please tell me, so I'll feel better about asking for them. I really want them after hearing about them and seeing what they can do, but 3D software costs a lot of money. I want to make sure that I know what I'm getting into before I consider them. Perhaps this thread can also serve as reassurance for anyone else who's looking to buy them, too. I'll still try to learn how to rig the old fashioned way in Maya, but this will tide me over until then.
Before I ask for it, though, I want to know if it's any good. I need to know if it can handle geometry imported from 3D Max, and how well it works with animal ears, tails and other non-human anatomy bits. I also need to know if it handles quadrupeds well, or even things like mermaid tails...stuff like that. If you have any of these pieces of software and know what it can do, please tell me, so I'll feel better about asking for them. I really want them after hearing about them and seeing what they can do, but 3D software costs a lot of money. I want to make sure that I know what I'm getting into before I consider them. Perhaps this thread can also serve as reassurance for anyone else who's looking to buy them, too. I'll still try to learn how to rig the old fashioned way in Maya, but this will tide me over until then.
Replies
Part of the beauty of TSM is that once its rigged you can use the rigs in any copy of Maya, you don't need TSM to animate. I think they have free sample rigs you can explore and see if you like how you interact with them, its pretty standard and all things you can do in Maya without TSM it just takes a little longer. So do you need TSM to rig characters? No. Does it help? Sure.
Personally I like the rigs available in Max, Biped is awesome at biped/quadruped, CAT is great at anything else, stuff with wings tails, 8 arms, 8 legs ect... Puppetshop is TSM's slutty twin sister and all of them come with more features than just bones and controls unlike TSM. All three have ways to copy/paste poses, mix, filter and blend motion and animation clips and have great IK/FK controls. They are all easier to use and way more functional than TSM.
If you are using Maya, there are free scripts that you might want to check out as well, to see if they'll do what you want. zooToolbox and Rapid Rig come to mind, though they probably won't suit anyting other than bipedal characters.
TSM is sweet in that it is very intuitive, creates a nice rig, and has a couple tools that really aid the skinning process. It's also nice that you can bolt together non-bipedal characters, and things like tails are pretty easy to do. You could add a TSM tail to take care of the animal ears, for example. With that said, using that would add complexity that you don't really need. For an ear, a couple joints and a simple control is all you need. Like Mark said, it's still important to know rigging so you can modify or add to things as you need. It also helps to understand what's going on underneath the hood with TSM, so you can troubleshoot any issues you run into.
TFM is very slick, and has some cool features such as pose saving and nice skin weighting. I haven't seen anything else for Maya that does what it does, so I can't compare it to other options. It's pretty much useful only for humanoid faces, though, so it won't work well for animals with really elongated faces. I haven't used either in quite awhile, but having a character with both TFM and TSM was fairly sluggish performance-wise. This may be something that has been fixed, or may be dependant on your computer.