Enlighten me about AM, I don't know much

[Goon]

Animating in A:M is yummy. (take a look at the A:M forum, its in the application specific section.) Very simple, quite powerful.
Animating is its forte and its strongest point.
It is structured in compartments essentially.
You make a model in the modeling window. This is also were it is given bones and skinned. Changes can be made before, during, and after animation, though obviously removing or renaming a bone will screw things up.
It is then imported into an action window. Everthing in here can be re-used. Multiple objects can be imported, and everthing can be saved as a pose, a pose slider with n-number of keys, or as a smartskin (tweaked deformation based upon bone rotation, very nice :)). The rigging is done here as well, with a large number of constraints available, as well as expressions.
These actions can be anything from a walk cycle, to a wave, to a jump. They can then be dropped into the choreography window which is the actual set, and be used as NLE clips, overlayed, combined with in-choreography animation, etc.
It all works quite well, and is very nice to work with.

Everything goes downhill from there.
Be prepared for spline-only modeling. To get a taste of this try out Hamapatch (its free, but Hama's interface is wack, A:M's much better and very clean). Its not too bad, but your only option is point by point modeling. Modeling is constrained to 3, 4, and 5 sided patches, anything but a 4 pole vertex does not smooth well. A useful solution that they have for reducing/localizing detail is a "hook" which allows a spline to terminate at the midpoint of another, assuming its tangency and retaining the 4 sided patch structure.

Renderer is being improved. It still isnt great and is fairly slow, but its much better than before.
Particles, soft and hardbody solutions, cloth, they are all there but have never been very effective or usefull solutions.
Stability is up. Its still not perfect, but after the v9.5 (they are now on v10.5) fiasco, its a big improvement.

[Andy741]

Have you considered Messiah:Animate or Motion Builder? There's a demo for m:a at www.projectmessiah.com I think it looks pretty good and it has some pretty sweet character animation tools. Utilizing bones for facial expressions is pretty cool.

You could use bones for facial animation in Animation Master, but I'm not sure how stabile it will be for that. A:M's biggest drawback in my opinion is its lack of stability. But the programmers do work on that when you report bugs to them.

[spakman]

Check out Jeff Lew's opinions. (I remember there was this time we were trying to figure out what the closest equivilant of Hash's aim at constraint would be in Maya in regards to elbows - that whole pole vector thingy). IMHO, AM was ahead of it's time in respect to animation and built in constraints that got rid of the need for many of the expressions used in apps like soft 3.8 and such (I think that was a bit of Steph Greenberg's hand being lent there), and Hash was the first with a real NLA. It was fun to just animate instead of being forced into art techery.

I just wish they allowed for polygons. The first time I saw Bay Raitt's approach, I knew there was no going back to splines of any kind. Topology that took me weeks to build with splines, was reduced to days/hours via polys.

(IMO, the perfect app would have been an AM/Nendo hybrid. I've done my best to get Maya as close to that as possible - hilarious when folks hit "F" to focus and intead shift into sub-object mode with faces highlighted. I keep telling them its "A" for "Aim")

I haven't used AM in quite awhile (since v 5?), so I can only imagine how far it's advanced. (Still waiting for real NLA to land on my desk. Right now it's a bit of a hack.)

*EDIT: I guess I didn't really answer the question. Personally, I'm prolly gonna buy AM again, just so I can follow Jeff's stuff on that cd of his.

For getting on the fast track to understanding animation and lighting regardless of where you want to take that knowledge, Animation Master is prolly the best single package out there. (just my O, ain't sayin it's so) ;)

As far as bugs, from my experience, soft 3.8+ has them, XSI has them, and so to with Maya. As for other "pro" apps, I can't say.

There's also a forum in this website, with tons of knowledge from old-skool cats who love the app. Ultimately up to you which program you pick. END EDIT*

peace d=^)

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