character vs skin

[FY]

I think you want to know the difference between character studio and traditional bone animation?!
With character studio it's possible to assign motion captured data easily and without concerning about the right bone structure because you got your biped. It is possible to change the shape of your biped-limbs and also to add additional arm and legs but these are not affected by your motion capture data. Further disadvanteges are that you cannot use the max constrains, wire parameters and that you cannot see any animation curves in track view. It's also not possible to link the biped bones to handles which make animation much easier.
The advantages of bones are that you can assign it to any character regardless of its shape. You also got many possibilities to optimize it to your needs (slider/wire parameters, constrains, etc.).
I think that it depends on the purpose of your character animation whether you use character studio or bones. I think for the most game engines it is easier to import motion from character studio. On the other hand bones are possibly more suitable for high end animation.

[toma]

Hya !

mmm Psychodad i love your avatar...reminds of some www.uglypeople.com pictures :p

[Ls3D]

Easy toma that could be from his web cam!

my .02 - motion capture is just a bit over rated. Most of my characters can not articulate the full range of my mocap library, but I like being able to combine mocap with freeform in CS for those few times it works great out of the box.

Also biped is just a starting place when generating footsteps. It says so in the manual but this really sinks in when you get going with it! Can you say robot?

-Shea
www.Ls3D.com

[skunk184]

you can use character studios physique on a bone setup that your animating in max........

i know biped uses tcb controllers but once you get used to them i dont see why your final results would be better if you used max......that made no sense to me......not being able to use max's constraints to control the pelvis is Cstudio main downfall but thats not such a big problem

physique is alot more controlable compared to max' s skin......

[luigi]

well thanks for yours opions :D

for me cant see the curves in biped bones are a little problem.
and can´t use wired parametres too.

My new character is going to have cartoonish look
For the animation i was seeing to build a special skeleton.


As boped in pepeland (http://www.pepeland.com)


or charrigger in comet cartoons (http://www.comet-cartoons.com/toons/maxscript.cfm)


this two skeleton have a diferent and graceful movement.
for this case i think a not biped skeleton is a good advantage.

you do not think the same?

[L0rd]

In my experience using standard bone setup in Max 4 allows for greater control of characters, I find CS frustrating and restricting(to easy to be true), having said that I've never used Mocap either. The fact that you can custom attribute and wire your character's rig to your hearts content with Max bones (Bless those chaps at discreet, damn godsend beautiful thing) allows for great control of your character animation, animating can become very quick. I personally hate TCB controllers. I find them too general. I find euler's allow for very specific results.
The Skin Modifier can be a little frustrating at times, but with a little time spent understanding the gizmo's for joint's and bulges etc you can acheive very good results. If your Keyframe animating your character's I'd stick with standard max Bones and skin.
There's lots more you probibly need to look into with Character rigging though, Comets site's a really good place to start.

Good Luck[B]

[chessjr]

well I kinda like bone pro 3 over both but ACT looks interesting
does anybody have any experience with it?

[MrHooper]

1. Physique vs. Skin

This is pretty subjective. Both work very well. Skin is more down to earth. It works more like traditional tools from other platforms. So for some, it may be easier to use. I do a lot of manual vertex weighting. And Skin (especially with Comet's weight table script) is a lot better for this. I've found that new versions of Physique are more efficient and faster than skin. Especially noticable with high polycounts. Physique also has nice settings for skin twisting along a link. This is cool. But I still end up using Skin for most things, since I have a massive hatred for Char Studio.

2. Biped

Do yourselves a favor. Never use biped. EVER. If you ever want a higher end job in the industry, you should really know how they actually rig things. biped is a nice tool for something quick, but it has a stigma in the industry. A very REAL stigma. You cannot edit curves, and you cannot do custom anything. No scripting, and you get to learn a super proprietary method of animation that no studio doing real work would ever think of using. Footsteps. nope. TCB curves. nope. vertical and horizontal keys? nope. No animation behind the zero frame. BIG NOPE. strange footstep ediiting in the trackview with overlapping foot plants. silly. Layers that should be very cool, but when flattened don't represent your animation properly. crap. Using mocap with biped is also a real pain. It seems to do some cool stuff, like letting you animate iK over mocap, but it breaks, and it does some very mysterious things.

Well, I'm sure you get the gist of my distaste for biped. take this for what it's worth.

3. Rigging in max4

This is cool for the most part. Bones and ik in max 4 operate nicely. Custom attributes and wiring, though useful, could use some work. But this will get you much closer to a professional rig.

Andrew

[skunk184]

MrHooper or anyone....i know exactly what your saying about Biped but.......
i just finished my final project for uni using Character Studio....the reason i used character studio was i had 4 characters all synced to music each character doing diferent dance steps.......the animation is a minute and a half long so each characters animation had to be done in one hit.......... i made a series of short freeform .bip files all in time to the music for each character and put them together in the motion flow mode(non linear anim ...well sort of)....it was a bit of a pain having to pin all the hands and feet afterwards but doing this in max would have been a nightmare..........i can rig in max to a good standard and would have loved to use my rig instead of the crappy biped but unless i ve missed something big here (which i hope i have)i would ve had to do the a minute and a half of synced charaqcter animation in one hit which is ridiculous.....as far as im aware max does nt support non linear animation and i could nt see a way of getting my rig into character studio so i could save little .bip files with it................so as for not using Biped what else could i have done?????????????

cheers

Craig

[L0rd]

No don't think your missing anything,
Cool if Max could do non linear Character animation....

.
.

[MrHooper]

Your pain is heard and noted. Indeed Max could use some non-linear animation tools. We use a lot of mocap here, for time-sensitive projects, so that's how we would have handled your situation. Of course most don't have that option. In such a case, forgive my sarcasm... we have to animate.

Not to sound like a jerk... but I'd bet anything that had you animated it from begin to end, instead of blended parts together, it would have been better, much more lifelike, more fun and much more rewarding.

To quote from your previous post. a minute and a half of animation is *not really* "ridiculous."

I'll give you this though. Your example is about the most reasonable use of biped I have heard. I can see that situation, and I hope it turned out well.

I just don't like leaning on the crutch when it can be avoided. Animation is an art from, and it saddens me a bit to see it reduced to motion flow editing movements together.

Andrew

[skunk184]

MrHooper.....I tried to post my animation for crits in the 3d artwork section but as im still a student i cant really afford web space so i uploaded it to yahoo,cause its the only place i could find that would upload a 3.7 mb file(i really could nt compress it more than that).....unfortunately i m the only one who can see the animation in my briefcase file........im willing to send you the animation if you want to crit it.......im pretty happy with it and i really dont think it would ve turned out much differently if id animated with my own rig .....as for a minute and a half of animation not being impossible, to do in one hit without the aid of non linear animation , i agree with you but you got remember i had 4 characters so 6 mins of synced character animation theres also about 40 seconds of lip synced animation with out the aid of plugins ....i had to research it ....design it .....storyboard it and animate it in a limited time frame cause it s a uni project ....soo i had to choose the method that would give me thee quickest results which was biped and motion flow......i m not convinced with character studio but for this project i still think it was my only option...........NON LINEAR ANIMATION IS DEFINATELY REQUIRED and i cant believe discreet never put it in version 4 .......a major tool that is missing.....
also i dont see that using character studio in this instance can be considered as using a crutch ......i can rig and i can animate my rigs and also i can use Character Studio , so i say it was another string to my bow even if has got a stigma in the industry ,surely its better to know how to use it in case you have to....
If you wanna see the Animation just ask...id like too know what you think.......

cheers
Craig

[MrHooper]

Calm down;) I don't mean to imply that you were "cheating." I have spent enough time freelancing, budgeting, and scheduling to know the realities of production. When the time pinch comes down on you, and you have to do the impossible, then there are tools to help you.

NLA is one such tool. I'm not dissing you for using it. In fact, I said, you had a valid reason. I just mean to point out a general distaste I have for that mode of operation in general.

Believe me, where I work, sacrifices in quality have to be made in order to meet deadlines on time and on budget. For our production we have used Biped, and in the end for our animators, it always slows us down and limits our control when Animating.

I would like to define my terms here. Animation is what I think of as posing, keyframing, breaking down, and refining curves. An art form most admirably descibed in detail in the Richard Williams, "The Animators Survival Kit."

NLA, is a very different mode of operation to me, and so I consider it something else. It's less concerned with acting and performance, and more autonomous and mechanical. While fine for a given purpose, my original post simply meant to say, that you won't be getting ILM knocking at your door, without being able to animate in a traditional sense.

I mean no offense, and realize I come off sounding harsh. Not at all, and I commend anyone for coaxing motion flow into anything useful. it's not the interface to NLA I would prefer.

If you have to use the tool to get something out the door. It's there, and should be used. But to move forward as an animator, NLA will not help you.

...and biped will keep you from using standard tools of the industry.

Though I hear that the new version of CS will include euler curves for editing in trackview. A much needed "advance."

We have a joke around the office regarding "communistStudio." Given that nickname because it is the great equalizer. It can make a poor animator mediocre, and a great animator mediocre all the same.

"Are some of your animators just too good? Making your less trained ones look bad? Get "Communist Studio," and all your animation will blend together perfectly." But I kid. Please no hate mail, it's just a joke. I thought it was funny, but you probably don't;)

Andrew

[skunk184]

Andrew(MrHooper)...i never took offence from any of your posts .....its good to here from animators in the working world:D ....im just desperate to get a job and i ve never put so much effort into anything in my life and probably why i come across defensive......"communist studio"...... i like it.......i was just trying to justify my reason for using it and you touched a nerve and i got the urge to type........As for ILM knocking on my door , i was waiting for PIXAR :scream: :scream: :scream: :scream: ONLY JOKING anyones studio will do for a start ...although i think i got enough talent to get into the industry i also realize that i still have alot to learn but the only way i will get to learn anything now is to be working under pro animators with loads of experience .........

i would still like you view my Animation as you seem to know your stuff and your CV says you certainly got the experience .....maybe you could tell me if it will catch the eye of someone who looks at hundreads of showreels or you can tell me its rubbish , i dont mind ....it would be really nice to get some unbiased feedback ....it seems hard to get people to tell you the truth and that makes it hard to know if im good enough to animate for a living or should i just go back to breaking my back on a building site............

Cheers:beer:

Craig..............

[MrHooper]

You can post any portfolio work to our company database, if you like. We keep a large database of freelancers and studios to pick up work that we cannot handle. We aren't terribly large, and scalabilitiy is important to our company. (Digital Production Solutions).

It won't get you seen in the world, but it's an easy way to submit a demo reel to us. Just go to:
www.globalanimationstudio.com
and follow the directions to apply.

We are always happy to look at new reels, and I'll certainly let you know what I think. Let me know when it's posted.

email me at andrew@3dlight.com

This goes for anyone else as well. We are currently a sponsor of 3dluver. so if you go there, you can link to us from the small banner at the top of their site.

We haven't farmed out much work yet. We are still in the testing phase with a select few. However in the future, we may be farming out more of our work to talented freelancers around the world. So signing up can't hurt. All info is kept private, and will not be published or sold to anyone.

______________________________
Andrew Weidenhammer
Art Director and 3D technical mayhem
DigiProdSolutions

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