Character animation Maya/Max ?

[jason-slab]

well i've been playing with max5 for a few days now, must say it's got some really nice animation and modeling features , but at the end of the day maya has the edge when it comes to animation, nla comes to mind.

as far as rendering, well ummmm errrr mental ray maybe?

[GrafOrlok]

I'm not all that experienced in MAX, but currently I am animating characters for a game, and I have to use Character Studio in MAX 4.02.

CS is IMO very basic, fast, down and dirty when it comes to set-up. You get a character skinned and rigged in no-time, as where in Maya you have to be very skilled to get a good rig. The downside with this is that you have less precission in CS and weighting might take forever to get it perfect. I have to limit joint influence per vertice to 2, which limits things further though. Maya may be very difficult to get a great set-up, working similar to CS, but you also have much more controll over the final result and you can customize it at a completely different level.

Animation-wise I'd say there is no competition. Maya kicks #ss when it comes to controlling/editing your animation. The only thing I really dig with CS is the way you can plant feet and hands, and the totally seamless integration of forward/inverse kinematics.

I still wish you had the choise of a similar thing in Maya, where you just push a button and there you have a full working skeleton, for some down and dirty animation. Or throw a motion capture file at it to get it to do that silly ballet moves or whatever... :buttrock:

[kamsvag]

Hey Graf Orlok. Have you tried using filmbox with maya? I used it while I was working on a game company. It's sweet. You have the ability to change the rigg realy much while animating. I'd say it's character studio for adults. No kidding, I was blown away by how powerful it was to animate in.

Filmbox can be used with max as well, and you can transport animation between the packages with filmbox.

Filmbox rocks!:airguitar

[GrafOrlok]

Cool!

I use the FBX format to model/texture in Maya and bring it over to MAX for animation with CS. Have to check it out then...

Is it Kaydara Motion builder or is there a specific Filmbox program?

[kamsvag]

Kaydara switched the name of the product as it got more advanced. The new product is motionbuilder.

[playmesumch00ns]

There's a script on highend called advanced skeleton to build a rig for you, with options for including/skipping advanced controls like reverse foot, FK/IK etc. Haven't tried it but it sounds pretty good.

It shouldn't be too hard to do a footstep system either with MEL. I never liked the footstep system in CS, my skeletons always looked like they had a really bad case of piles when they walked. Always seemed to me like it was just a shortcut...

[womanonfire]

I have tried it and Advanced Skeleton works really quite well.... Even has little sliders to control the curl of the fingers.
One of the nicest things about it is that at the click of a button you can save poses to a button which you can drag to your toolbar, makes it easy to switch between poses and apply them to other skeletons.

Another system for Maya which is in development and looks quite promising is CSforMaya http://tbyf.w15.dns110.com/dxawvf/3dx.htm

I've emailed with the pesron developing the system and they say they're going to release some sort of bvh > clip converter for making motion files to use with CSforMaya as well... this should help us Maya users out alot.

[steveblake]

Just a thought but the Move, Rotate and Key functions work pretty well in Maya, and the Graph editor does it's job...You'll need little else in your character animation toolkit (to begin with anyway)

[GrafOrlok]

I've used Advanced skeleton quite extensively, and it is... advanced. So advanced that you feel totally left out of control. Get me right here, I really like it, but there are issues. Yes, you can save poses and stuff, but building it can get tricky (getting back to bind pose impossible). You have to know how things work with it before building your geometry. Hands in particular. And the finger curls are nice, but you'd want more freedom. I haven't found a satisfying way of hand animate fingers or building my own "set driven keys".

And when using Cloth things didn't work at all. But that could have been another issue, haven't had time to see what really went wrong there, did a workaround instead.

And seeing it as a subtitute for Character studio... well, the advantage with CS is its ease of use, which I can't say Advanced Skeleton is. I checked Kamsvåg's tip using Kaydara Motionbuilder (www.kaydara.com) and it looked real good. But then you're not working with Maya anymore. Check the QT-clip at their site.
:beer:

[steveblake]

If you must use a ready made rig, this one's probebly the simplest
http://www.vfs.com/~m07goosh/IKJoe/IkJoe.zip

[Mandrake]

There is a bug with AS 1.6 and Maya cloth. I got a reply
from Animation Studios:


Hi,
Thanks for the bugReport.
I`m still working for a proper solution for this.
For now the temporary solution is:

the right side
disconnect the connection
from:
characterName_IKfootGrp_Object_R.Toe
(it goes via a unitConversion)
to:
characterName_Ikball_R.rotateAxisX

+ the left side
from:
characterName_IKfootGrp_Object_L.Toe
(it goes via a unitConversion)
to:
characterName_Ikball_L.rotateAxisX

Note that this unfortunately means that you will loose all animation you may have on the Toes.
Please let me know if this fixes the mayaCloth conflict.

[JasonA]

Ok, I think I'm getting a much better feel for the differences between them (sort of anyways). Let me ask a few other questions more specifically:

1. Sounds like in Maya you have to create a bones rig custom from scratch everytime then, including FK/IK, then enveloping etc? ouch, thats painful alright. Ok What makes the controls so much better than CS's biped?

2. Could anyone elaborate on why "at the end of the day" Maya's animation capabilities kick a$$ over CS?

3. Can you save motion animation files for your skeletal rig and apply them to other bones setups, like walk, run, jump cycles, etc (this is like saving *.bip files in CS which can be applied to other bipeds)

4. Can you not apply mocap data to animations natively in maya? (not like I have a mocap system, but thought I'd ask)

Thats all I can think of at the moment. Oh, stal3fish, is the MR beta available yet?

[Nemises]

I believe you have lots of "similar" options built into the Character sheet in Maya in terms of saving motions.

As someone says above, CS is quick and dirty....great for those muck around anims...but to get stuff to a pro level (not as if I'd know, but still ;) ), you need a tighter level of control that just CS will give you.

There is a free plugin for Maya 4+ (scomes on the CD) called Dominatrix.
This is a Motion Capture import utility, it seems to support pretty much 99% of the major mo-cap formats.

I know less about Mayas incredible animation suite than I do max's .. but I have fallen in love with Maya's modelling, and Dynamics.

[AnimBot]

I use Character Studio everyday at work, and it's actually the first 3d tool I used to learn character animation with. So I'm pretty experienced with CS. The number one reason you should pick Maya over Character Studio is F-Curves CS does not support them currently. Although it looks like they have some nice things coming in this area in the next version. CS is also not as customizable as it should be so you don't get that level of control that you would with Maya's system. It does have it's own flavor of non linear animation in motion flow, however if ayone has ever used it for more than five bip animations you realize how quickly you want to shoot yourself. There are some very cool things about Character Studio though. IK blending for the hands and feet are very nice. It is incredibly quick from setup to animation, which is why we use it so much and is probably one of it's biggest selling points. It also has the ability of layering your animation much like a photoshop file that would retain animation information. So there are alot of cool things about it. So to answer your question overall Maya would be the better choice over Character Studio. However as a Max user who was once in your shoes Max4 & 5's native bones and animation system are prettey good just something else to consider. Although still not caught up to Maya there are some things that are very similar. By very similar I mean exactly the same (did they really need to steal the hotkeys for the translation tools? Wierd.)

[beaker]

For quick skeleton setup and creation in maya you guys should check out the old script called "SkeletonWorks".
windows:
http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Community/Download/plug_ins/maya_nt/skeletonWorks/skeletonWorks.html
*nix
http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Community/Download/plug_ins/maya_irix/skeletonWorks/skeletonWorks.html

It's just a script so it should work in any version/platform.

[GrafOrlok]

Mandrake;

Thanks! Yes I used Advanced Skeleton 1.6, so this bug fix might come useful! I'll try it out.

JasonA;

1:Yes (if you don't use AS or similar). Controling the rig is not easier with Maya, but you have a much more control over what's going on in the rig. I doubt it differs much from MAX's bones though. The control lies in how you can edit your animation. Using the Graph editor is a dream and very intuitive. You can in theory animate your whole sequence just in the Graph editor (OK, maybe a little exaggerated:) ) just by moving/adding keys, adjusting curves and all. I know you can do similar in MAX, but it does not seem to work with CS.

2:see above. I could keep on rambling about it, but enough is enough

3: Yes using tracks you can save clips of animation data. However you need an identically named rig to get it to work for another model. But here is where I would like to be able to animate in layers as in CS. This doesn't work satisfying. Layers are good...

4: See AnimBot's post.

And at the end of the day. Try it hands on. You'll get a hang of it. Use IKjoe mentioned earlier. This is a ready made rig on a simple character ready to be animated.

[ryguy]

As Graf mentioned, you have Clips which you have control of in the Trax Editor. It's a non-linear editor setup sort of like Adobe Premiere. You can create a clip out of an animation you create... say a walk cycle. Then you can copy and paste that clip where ever you want. The trax editor also has tools you can do with the clips, like blending, instantce, merging, etc. So with your walk cycle, say you add a run cycle as a separate clip. Then you could blend these two clips together so they flow seamlessly.

If you have a load of characters that will use the same rig, you can use Maya's copy weights or import/export weight maps to apply the same rig to the other characters.

SkeletonWorks is a great tool to have. It gives you a basic skeletal structure. I sometimes use this tool along with my own rigs (for example. I create a hand and fingers rig and parent that to the wrist bone allowing me to have full control over the fingers and how many fingers my character has).

~Ryan

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