I'm pretty sure with all questions like, the answer is it varies from studio to studio.
I've heard that most animators generally consider Maya to be a better package for animating than Max, but I'm not much of an animator and can't really rightfully validate that sentiment. It may have something to do with the prevalence of maya being used in film production, and having easier back and forth, but even then alot of production houses use proprietary software anyway.
Motionbuilder is something that is becoming alot more common especially if the studio uses mocap data.
In the end though all that really matters is making good animations. While having a good grasp of a particular tool is a plus, but it won't matter if you have a mediocre animation foundation, unless you are looking for some sort of technical animator position.
My company is presently using CAT on a pretty big project.
My recommendation to you would be to avoid CAT.
If you are thinking in using it in a project that is... if you are trying to learn the tools of the trade, you probably should learn it, but learn Motionbuilder as well!
I've mentioned Motionbuilder in earlier threads, cool to see some people doing the same.
It's not used only for mocap, at least that's not the only strong point it has.
The layer functions are nice (I personally never use them for handkey animation though, baselayer oldschool G all the way), the way you work with Takes in ONE file rather than having all kinds of animations in different files. The takes are kind of like clips in Maya I guess, but with a smoother and more straight forward workflow.
Story Mode is an awesome way of frankenstein-ing animations, motioncapture together into a whole sequence. Used for cutscenes at my place..Instead of having a timeline that stretches over a couple of thousand frames, you just have separate shorter takes which are loaded into Story Mode and strung up to form a whole cutscene..
Those are some of the reasons I'd say why gamedev studios are using Motion Builder..
Yeah I wouldn't worry about it, as long as you know how to set keys and tweak graphs you're pretty much good to go
Well, I wouldn't say that. There's actually a lot to know about the physics of animation. Weight, balance, anticipation, follow-through, squash and stretch, and ease-in/out are all things you need to know to be an animator. Unless you're assuming it's a given that he know them?
If you are thinking in using it in a project that is... if you are trying to learn the tools of the trade, you probably should learn it, but learn Motionbuilder as well!
How come?
We're using CAT now too on a pretty big project. Been liking it a lot compared to biped or standard bones. It made our lives much easier when doing creatures with strange or asymmetrical anatomy.
Just curious what kind of difficulties you've been having.
since we're on the topic, can someone point me to that new website that recently opened up that allows the importing of models straight into a rigging program, and sells mocap, and other animations in the same interface, i saw they were doing a contest a while back for publicity, but cant find their name again, thanks.
We're using CAT now too on a pretty big project. Been liking it a lot compared to biped or standard bones. It made our lives much easier when doing creatures with strange or asymmetrical anatomy.
Just curious what kind of difficulties you've been having.
We are having to do a lot of linking characters to other meshes (vehicles, othe characters, etc). Could be because we rigged on top of CAT? I'm not sure if that happened, but the rigs have gizmo controls (i.e. spline square and circles) anyways; which we would really like to link to stuff with the link tool, but we have to go into the hierarchy panel, make sure CAT animation is turned on, go down into the hiearchy of the attachment, create a link constraint to a specific part of it... god its so messy. And that's only one issue we've been having out of several, that I am too exhausted to recollect right now, I am just on autopilot when I go into work.... Maybe its not so great for pre-rendered stuff but is handier for games stuff, I don't know.
since we're on the topic, can someone point me to that new website that recently opened up that allows the importing of models straight into a rigging program, and sells mocap, and other animations in the same interface, i saw they were doing a contest a while back for publicity, but cant find their name again, thanks.
but what I wanna know is if I use mixamo to rig a character can I just buy that fully rigged character in a t pose put that into maya and then later add animations to it through mocap or other mixamo files? like how would you keep your rig but import new keyframes for that rig?
Wow guys!! you all are amazing. I had a hard time navigating these forums before but I found my post again. Thank you all.
I was using maya but I figured trying to learn max and maya was just a headache. I want to know which one was preferable in the game developing industry. I ended up dropping maya for the sake of reclaiming my sanity. I wasn't sure what to study in either program. So I guess its modeling in max and animating in maya (or motion builder)?
Again, thank you all for your support. Polycount is amazing!!
I really like biped in max for well... bipeds. CAT is pretty nice but a big buggy and the IK/FK switching is a bit of a pain in the ass, biped has spoiled me in that regard. Also the copy/paste pose library and motion mixing capabilities just aren't really that well developed or integrated into CAT.
I really like Motion Builder but setting everything up in a 3rd party app is a pain, and you're missing all of the other tools you normally have its just kind of clunky being a 3rd party app.
HumanIK in Maya is pretty much a straight rip of Motion Builder stuffed into Maya which makes it awesome. All of the great stuff from motion builder in the core app. It's fast, flexible and easy to use. It can auto generate and characterize a rig, it does full body IK not just limbs, it has animation retargeting which makes cleaning up mo-cap easier as well as blending animations you've already done, Great stuff!
I only wish Max had HumanIK and that it was portable to Maya. It would be a dream come true if that ever happens. Then it would matter quite a bit less which app a studio uses.
We use max at work. Our pipeline lets animators use CAT, Biped, Puppetshop or custom skeleton rigs. For a while we used MotionBuilder and we all loved the added tools it offered but it was too much of a pain jumping in and out of max.
A friend of mine who uses Maya was talking about HumanIK and after looking into it, grabbed the trial and messed around with it for a few hours. I found it to be pretty much just like MotionBuilder but native to Maya. Quite a gift to Maya users, most don't even know what they have yet. I suspect as more studios look into it they'll start to use it, but animation piplines are ancient and hard to modify so I don't expect it to happen overnight.
After playing with it for a while it was clear it rocked just like MotionBuilder. Sadly we use max at work so no HumanIK for me in my day to day animating... yet... but I wouldn't mind going to a Maya studio and using it, that would rock. But then I would hate the loss of modeling tools and maxscripting so really I just want HumanIK for max hahaha =D
I've had problems with Maya's HumanIK where you move controllers around without the skinned mesh following until you actually let go of the controllers.. where as in Motionbuilder and well.. any other rig except for HumanIK updates the character while you move stuff around.. very awkward to work with it "lagging" like that.
I ran into that too, and there are a few other things that are annoying like rigs needing to be in a T-Pose and it seemed like I couldn't undo much of anything without problems or crashes. But those are warts I hope they work out. It just showed up in 2012 from what I remember so hopefully they'll improve those things in newer versions. It's too awesome to let languish in plug-in hell forever.
Motionbuilder all the way for mocap. I don't know if any other application has something equivalent to the story window where you have all of your mocapclips, nice overview of animationlayers and keys, constrains and camera switcher in one single window.
I haven't tried HumanIK for Maya it looks really good but if it doesn't come with the the story window... Man i don't know...
Also the viewport in Motionbuilder is way faster compared to Mayas I think.
Ive never tried Biped or CAT but Iv'e checked them out and I can't see them beat a good custom made rig but they look really fast and easy to setup characters with so I suppose thats their main strength?
Ok.....seems to be a few directions to go. I would like to learn to make custom bones. I'm guessing, since i'm in max primarily, I would learn to rig in there. I tried CAT before but it, like many of you guys said, was buggy. Before that I tried biped, and someone told me that many studios don't use biped, and I was kinda getting to like it. So I guess I will be safe with making custom bones. If anyone would like to add to this or have some take on this, I would like to hear it. If anyone supports this, do you have a place that I can learn more about building custom rigs?
PS. The dvds I have gotten on max rigging have had characters that were non-humanoid so the eyes got rigged oddly to me and there was squashing and stretching and " boingy" sounds all over the place. I want to learn to rig humans well.
I've had problems with Maya's HumanIK where you move controllers around without the skinned mesh following until you actually let go of the controllers.. where as in Motionbuilder and well.. any other rig except for HumanIK updates the character while you move stuff around.. very awkward to work with it "lagging" like that.
oh yea, had that same problem and overall humanIK has some very weird bugs from time to time, like HumanIK ignoring keys: When moving/rotating the controllers everything is alright, but then after starting to key, humanIK starts "ignoring" some of the keys. Deleting all the keys and then undoing brought the keys back and somehow only then they became active. So I basically when I keyed, I had to delete the keys and then undo to see the animation. The problem consisted for days even after a maya reinstall and then suddenly the problem just disappeared. It was weird. :poly142:
But I never had to actually use it at work.
IMO humanIK isn't very intuitive in terms of animation. Half-transparent and small ball-like controls that are partially almost hidden... It always felt a bit awkward animating with them. I guess its something to get used to first..
Anyway:
@stonedove, I would recommend you the Digital Tutors "Rigging Characters for Production" tutorial, since it teaches you to rig in a clean and simple way in Maya.
However Digital Tutors also have very good rigging tutorials for Max.
I've noticed that digital tutors have a ton a awesome content for both. I am trying to stick with max for the most part. I don't want to have to learn max and maya, which I was trying to do for a while and the back and forth gave me a major headache. So...I will head over to digital tutors again to see what to get from there.
Replies
I've heard that most animators generally consider Maya to be a better package for animating than Max, but I'm not much of an animator and can't really rightfully validate that sentiment. It may have something to do with the prevalence of maya being used in film production, and having easier back and forth, but even then alot of production houses use proprietary software anyway.
Motionbuilder is something that is becoming alot more common especially if the studio uses mocap data.
In the end though all that really matters is making good animations. While having a good grasp of a particular tool is a plus, but it won't matter if you have a mediocre animation foundation, unless you are looking for some sort of technical animator position.
My recommendation to you would be to avoid CAT.
If you are thinking in using it in a project that is... if you are trying to learn the tools of the trade, you probably should learn it, but learn Motionbuilder as well!
It's not used only for mocap, at least that's not the only strong point it has.
The layer functions are nice (I personally never use them for handkey animation though, baselayer oldschool G all the way), the way you work with Takes in ONE file rather than having all kinds of animations in different files. The takes are kind of like clips in Maya I guess, but with a smoother and more straight forward workflow.
Story Mode is an awesome way of frankenstein-ing animations, motioncapture together into a whole sequence. Used for cutscenes at my place..Instead of having a timeline that stretches over a couple of thousand frames, you just have separate shorter takes which are loaded into Story Mode and strung up to form a whole cutscene..
Those are some of the reasons I'd say why gamedev studios are using Motion Builder..
Well, I wouldn't say that. There's actually a lot to know about the physics of animation. Weight, balance, anticipation, follow-through, squash and stretch, and ease-in/out are all things you need to know to be an animator. Unless you're assuming it's a given that he know them?
How come?
We're using CAT now too on a pretty big project. Been liking it a lot compared to biped or standard bones. It made our lives much easier when doing creatures with strange or asymmetrical anatomy.
Just curious what kind of difficulties you've been having.
@achillesian: mixamo? it's the banner that's always up there for me
We are having to do a lot of linking characters to other meshes (vehicles, othe characters, etc). Could be because we rigged on top of CAT? I'm not sure if that happened, but the rigs have gizmo controls (i.e. spline square and circles) anyways; which we would really like to link to stuff with the link tool, but we have to go into the hierarchy panel, make sure CAT animation is turned on, go down into the hiearchy of the attachment, create a link constraint to a specific part of it... god its so messy. And that's only one issue we've been having out of several, that I am too exhausted to recollect right now, I am just on autopilot when I go into work.... Maybe its not so great for pre-rendered stuff but is handier for games stuff, I don't know.
http://www.mixamo.com/
but what I wanna know is if I use mixamo to rig a character can I just buy that fully rigged character in a t pose put that into maya and then later add animations to it through mocap or other mixamo files? like how would you keep your rig but import new keyframes for that rig?
Tried to get on with Max, it didnt work out for my style of workflow I geuss..
Luckily at the studio im at we use Maya exclusively but im pretty certain that any future gigs il only ever use Maya...
Plus ive invested a lot of time in learning to script and rig pretty well in Maya.
I was using maya but I figured trying to learn max and maya was just a headache. I want to know which one was preferable in the game developing industry. I ended up dropping maya for the sake of reclaiming my sanity. I wasn't sure what to study in either program. So I guess its modeling in max and animating in maya (or motion builder)?
Again, thank you all for your support. Polycount is amazing!!
I really like Motion Builder but setting everything up in a 3rd party app is a pain, and you're missing all of the other tools you normally have its just kind of clunky being a 3rd party app.
HumanIK in Maya is pretty much a straight rip of Motion Builder stuffed into Maya which makes it awesome. All of the great stuff from motion builder in the core app. It's fast, flexible and easy to use. It can auto generate and characterize a rig, it does full body IK not just limbs, it has animation retargeting which makes cleaning up mo-cap easier as well as blending animations you've already done, Great stuff!
I only wish Max had HumanIK and that it was portable to Maya. It would be a dream come true if that ever happens. Then it would matter quite a bit less which app a studio uses.
Ok, thank you. That was very informative. I'm looking at humanIK now. So your using both max and maya in your workflow?
A friend of mine who uses Maya was talking about HumanIK and after looking into it, grabbed the trial and messed around with it for a few hours. I found it to be pretty much just like MotionBuilder but native to Maya. Quite a gift to Maya users, most don't even know what they have yet. I suspect as more studios look into it they'll start to use it, but animation piplines are ancient and hard to modify so I don't expect it to happen overnight.
After playing with it for a while it was clear it rocked just like MotionBuilder. Sadly we use max at work so no HumanIK for me in my day to day animating... yet... but I wouldn't mind going to a Maya studio and using it, that would rock. But then I would hate the loss of modeling tools and maxscripting so really I just want HumanIK for max hahaha =D
Motionbuilder all the way for mocap. I don't know if any other application has something equivalent to the story window where you have all of your mocapclips, nice overview of animationlayers and keys, constrains and camera switcher in one single window.
I haven't tried HumanIK for Maya it looks really good but if it doesn't come with the the story window... Man i don't know...
Also the viewport in Motionbuilder is way faster compared to Mayas I think.
Ive never tried Biped or CAT but Iv'e checked them out and I can't see them beat a good custom made rig but they look really fast and easy to setup characters with so I suppose thats their main strength?
PS. The dvds I have gotten on max rigging have had characters that were non-humanoid so the eyes got rigged oddly to me and there was squashing and stretching and " boingy" sounds all over the place. I want to learn to rig humans well.
oh yea, had that same problem and overall humanIK has some very weird bugs from time to time, like HumanIK ignoring keys: When moving/rotating the controllers everything is alright, but then after starting to key, humanIK starts "ignoring" some of the keys. Deleting all the keys and then undoing brought the keys back and somehow only then they became active. So I basically when I keyed, I had to delete the keys and then undo to see the animation. The problem consisted for days even after a maya reinstall and then suddenly the problem just disappeared. It was weird. :poly142:
But I never had to actually use it at work.
IMO humanIK isn't very intuitive in terms of animation. Half-transparent and small ball-like controls that are partially almost hidden... It always felt a bit awkward animating with them. I guess its something to get used to first..
Anyway:
@stonedove, I would recommend you the Digital Tutors "Rigging Characters for Production" tutorial, since it teaches you to rig in a clean and simple way in Maya.
However Digital Tutors also have very good rigging tutorials for Max.