I am dealing with what should hopefully be a simple thing to solve for someone more experienced in CAT rigging than I am. In the past I have been able to utilize CAT rigs for ‘brute force’ animating however I am now trying to get a greater understanding of how to use them and additionally how to optimize a CAT rig for production before even animating it. I’ve been following along with a Digital Tutors tutorial and have reached a point where I am now trying to checkbox the ‘Additive To Setup Pose’ option for each of my bones. The tutorial warns that this may introduce some undesired values into the bones and that to fix this you just zero out the transform curves in the curve editor. In order to get at the transform curves I must add an absolute layer of animation to my CAT rig. I can do that all fine and dandy and when I toggle the animation layer on/off all the bones and controls stay in place as expected. My issue occurs when I then delete that absolute layer of animation and then add a new one. After adding the new one and then toggling it on and off I get the same behavior I did as before the transform curves were zeroed and I have to go back in and zero them all out again (which just delivers me to the same predicament I was at previously). So it seems I could just live with the fact that I will have an abs layer on my CAT rig just for the sake of zeroing out controls. However I like everything I do in 3d to be clean and optimized and as such it is my assumption that there is a cleaner and more preffered way to get this same result. Furthermore, this behavior is so far exclusive to the leg and I have heard something about the ankle acting buggy when performing the ‘Additive To Setup Pose’ operation. I’m not sure if this is still true or if it was particular to earlier versions of Max/CAT. I’ve included an image as well as the file if those are helpful. Thanks for any help.
CAT rig and 'Additive To Setup Pose' issues.
Congratulations.
You’ve just encountered one of many known CAT bugs.
Use CAT at your own peril. Yes, it provides you with some out-of-the-box rigging solutions. Yes, it is more flexible than Biped. But it is FAR more buggy. If you have the time and expertise, I would investigate rolling your own solution. If you don’t have the resources or expertise, than CAT or Biped are serviceable alternatives, but they each have their drawbacks.
‘This bug occurs in 2012 and 2013.’
Well it looks like they can add 2014 to that list. Thanks for the reply. Im basically a 3d generalist and was hoping to find a way to get my characters rigged for animation. I have built custom rigs in both max and maya but I was hoping to find a more ‘automatic’ solution. I played with CAT before but was revisiting it as a possible tool to get my characters ready for animation much more quickly then building a custom rig. I’m more of an ‘over all production guy’ rather than focusing purely on any one discipline in 3d. That being said, do you have any suggestions where I might be able to find a stable semi-auto rigging solution such as CAT to get my characters ready for animation? I’ve been keeping an eye on the LudoRig auto rig plugin that I think is still in development, but other than looking at the schnazzy website and how-to videos I haven’t heard much else on this. I’m not sure if/when it will be available but it looks like how you would want/expect an auto rigging plugin to work.
I haven’t checked out the LudoRig yet.
If you don’t have the bandwidth to roll your own solution, than both CAT or Biped will do. Just be aware of their pros/cons.
It’s been awhile since I’ve used Biped, but when I’d used it, it was reasonably stable. It’s major downside is that it is fairly inflexible. Plus, I don’t think it ever got very far in providing real Euler curves for animators.
I have been using CAT for awhile, but I’m moving away from it due to its stability issues. Going down the fully custom rig route is time consuming, so there are definitely advantages to going with an out-of-the-box solution in that regard.
I also briefly checked out PuppetShop awhile ago. I haven’t used it enough to know how stable it is, but it might be worth checking out.
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