Messiah: Animate Question: Import to MAX

#1

I am interested in getting Messiah: Animate (or workstation) for my animator to use, but I have a question conerning the application. I have sent this question to the creators of Messiah, but they have thus far not answered.

We have a client that commissioned us to create a serious of animations for him. Later he wanted us to create models and rig them and then he would take the rigged models, apply the animations we had made and tweak them (if needed) for a particular model. Because this client has a set of animations for humanoid characters, we only have to provide him with rigged models.

Messiah: Animate looks very nice because of a few features. One that catches my attention is the ability to quickly attach a rig to a new model and, with very little effort, have it rigged right. This one feature looks like it would save us a lot of time and effort and, thus, speed up our production. This leads me to the question:

If we rig models in Messiah: Animate and then bring them into MAX, can we get out of MAX a rigged model that another MAX user can use if that user does NOT have Messiah: Animate?

In other words, can we rig models in Animate, bring them into MAX, save them out and then ship them to the client (who has MAX but not Animate) and, then, would he have a fully rigged model that he could use with the animations we had already created for him?

Thank you in advance for any help with this question.

#2

[color=white][color=white]ef9.com
“Point Oven is a baking system allowing the users of LW, Messiah, Maya and now 3DS Max to interchange animation data.”

Hi Dan,
I can highly recommend the above mesh baking plug from MarkWilson. Check it out, uyou won’t regret it. I managed a project this year (or last :wink: with messiah to Max, and exactly those points you mentioned were the reasons.
[/color][/color]
A messiah rig is only a m,essiah rig though. There is no exporter to get it into another prtogram. And I doubt that you would want to. Messiah works a bit differently. You can have the animator set up with the new cheaper user licence - very practical.

“would he have a fully rigged model that he could use with the animations we had already created for him?”
In other words: no. He would have a Max file with the character mesh, and the complete animation ‘baked’ within the vertex coordinates of that mesh. It would not be editable in the sense of changing poses, but it is editable in the sense of adding clothing and simulations, particles, even adding softbody wiggles to the belly, etc.

Hope this helps.

#3

Thanks for the information. It does help and it lets me know that I cannot use Messiah: Animate as I intended. Our client already has a pretty diverse set of BIP animations that we had developed and sent to him and he wants to keep using those. Therefore, he needs us to send him MAX models with MAX rigs.

Again, thanks for the information!

#4

That’s a great question, I asked Robert Landsal at Okino about the possibility of exchanging bone and weight data between programs, he said it was so extremely difficult he chose not to pursue it.

#5

think about that u can´t use messiah:workstation as plugin (except with that point oven thingie)

greetz
n-drew
a happy new year

#6

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.