Hello all,
I am brand new to CGTalk and I have a question for Bill E. and the rest of you…Does one need PrjMessiah to do character animation in LW 7.5? I’m coming from an AM background were I am barely above beginner level. If I had the $, would LW 7.5 only, be a good purchase for character animation?
Anyone use C4D v8 with MOCCA? I’ve played around with the demo and it seemed alittle confusing…but then again I am a beginner.
Thanks,
Pesto:airguitar
“need” is relative to your desires, wallet and level of patience.
LW has the tools to do character animation. Throw in ACS4 ($90) and you don’t even have to worry about most of the rigging process. There are some bone tools coming out from Irrational Tools that will make rigging much less of a hassle as well.
Where Messiah excels is primarily Speed. It FLIES. Lightwave gets very sluggish when you have complex or multiple simple IK chains. There are ways of making it speedier - but it is still no where near M:A’s speed.
Messiah has a lot of really nice tools but you can get work done without them. Just takes a little more patience.
Messiah, Lightwave and C4D all have demos available with tutorials. The Lightwave demo should downloadable soon…or so Newtke says. 
Make sure to work with them all a bit. Look for online tutorials on rigging, animating, texturing, etc. and see what you think of the workflow. You won’t go wrong with Lightwave or C4D - they are both very capable and stable apps.
Splinegod demoed some upcoming plug-ins from Irrational Number (http://www.irrationalnumber.com/html/Irr_home.htm) at the last LA Lightwave Users Group meeting. They are working on three packs of plug-ins. Based upon what I saw and heard, these plug-ins have the potential to make Messiah, ACS4, and Setup Machine largely irrelevant. Instead of workarounds involving skelegons, these plug-ins let you rig quickly and easily straight in Layout.
And you should be able to snag a copy of Messiah:Animate pretty cheaply. Just jump on the Yahoo group and say you want to buy a copy. There are usually lots of people selling.
Joe and I tried creating rigs and animating in just LW. We walked through a few tutorials we found online. Woo wee. . . I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The LW interface just wasn’t designed for character animation. Our experience with Animate has been very good. Extreamly fast etc.
But. . . this really doesn’t have anything to do with AM so. . . lets kill this thread to be consistant.
I have asked Tito if we could open up a section just for Messiah and I’m sure if a few people were to email him with that same suggestion it might happen sooner. Lets keep this area for AM. . .