WOW - Great news for Messiah Animate!

#1

Motion Builder Standard version has apparently been axed! Only the $4,000 pro version is to be continued. This is great news for messiah animate!!

PMG really need to make sure they don’t take their eye’s off animate - I think it’ll proove to be their strongest asset by a long way in the future - that is, if it’s aggressively updated and they develop their own, stronger method of connection - along the lines of POP but coded by them so that they maintain control. A POP system as opposed to a genuine connection would also be way way easier to keep on top of.

#2

Or make some kind of bundle deal with Mark

#3

No, I reckon something as crucial as host connection should be done in-house. Mark no longer, as far as I am aware, uses messiah and so, understandibly, it is a lower priority to him. It’s a critical part of messiah’s future and should be done in-house IMO.

#4

I do agree. How bad IS the connectivity. I’d gotten the impression that its decent at the moment. And the connectivity of FBX wasn’t as streamlined as how Messiah attempts to do it. With the new intergrated .mdd export couldn’t you just do it that way easily? Not sure how many of the big boys support .mdd import natively.

#5

It’s a bit of a guess here, but I reckon that building a point deform reader for each piece of sw wouldn’t be that time consuming and would probably not need to be updated regularly even between sw upgrades on the external apps, whereas a genuine connection will be more time consuming and will likely need to be fixed on external upgrades. I’ve found that a pipeline where you keep the apps completely separate and then use POP to transfer the motion data to be extremely efficient. Mock environments and just the characters makes for a really fast method of CA, where constant tweaks are necessary. The LW (or any other) is then automatically updated with the latest animation data. Works a treat!

#6

Then what about supporting that Collada format talked about two threads down?

#7

Motion Builder connects much better to a host app for transfering bone info and animation. Which is way more important than just sending camera or vertex data back and forth. That’s pretty much useless for games work. I’d love to be using messiah right now but MB still makes getting animation into another app so much easier so I continue using it while my messiah install eats up hd space.

Everyone else seems to be adding support for COLLADA now. It’s an open standard. It would solve my problem with messiah’s limited integration with other apps and even game engines. No need to waste time doing custom host support with COLLADA. It’s a one-time solution that is good for more than just film guys.

#8

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Motion Builder connects much better to a host app for transfering bone info and animation. Which is way more important than just sending camera or vertex data back and forth. That’s pretty much useless for games work. I’d love to be using messiah right now but MB still makes getting animation into another app so much easier so I continue using it while my messiah install eats up hd space.

Everyone else seems to be adding support for COLLADA now. It’s an open standard. It would solve my problem with messiah’s limited integration with other apps and even game engines. No need to waste time doing custom host support with COLLADA. It’s a one-time solution that is good for more than just film guys.
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Amen to that.
Still impossible to sell messiah for 3d real time…
When I think that in the first studio I worked we were using maya builder back in 2000 ( no blendshape available in this version! ) just to animate more easely ( crappy Max…)…
And this version of Maya used to cost higher than Max…

#9

My name is stooch and i support that statement.

Basically, to me, if tarons hints and collada where incorporated soon, i could see a bright future for messiah. its renderer is shaping up, now just to solidify the connection and they are golden!

for a program like messiah, integration should be number 1. for all the power, useability and intelligent design, it is useless without connecting solidly and flawlessly to EVERYTHING. and i can see collada being very widely accepted, so this should be a no-brainer.

#10

Well as a game artist/animator working on a new next gen engine I’d like to reiterate how important this has always been for me. I could be using messiah right now as the character animation foundation for our new pipeline. Back when we started our engine (after finishing up work with Epic on the UT franchise) we switched from max over to Lightwave simply because all the artists and level designers at Digital Extremes were using it. Only the animation department was using max at the time so it seemed logical to just move everything over to one app since we were starting from scratch. I quickly found a lot of things I didn’t like about animating in LW for a game pipeline. I started searching for solutions that would allow me to circumvent LW’s weaknesses and messiah and Motion Builder were the best 2 candidates.

Messiah was highly appealing simply for it’s relationship with LW. I actually preferred messiah over MB after working with the two for a bit as well, but I went with MB in the end because it was less hassle over all to get my work back into LW. Almost 3 years later, we’ve pretty much abandoned LW use for character work and gone with XSI as a complete replacement - partly because the initiative was mine to take in choosing an app that I felt would be best for our pipeline. I would have went with messiah hands down if the problems that initially turned me away from it had been addressed. I could still use it now if it had support for a common interchange format, and I probably would. I still prefer it over xsi for rigging and animation tasks.

This really is a good time for messiah to focus on animation integration. I’m willing to help however I can in this regard, but I really think pmG needs to show some interest here.

#11

Well PMG can take a real advantage of this for sure, there are still thousands of unhappy LW animators out there that cry for REAL animation tools, until now most of them had used MB for the obvious reasons, guess it´s time to get those users back into Messiah :wink:

Gwot is also right about COLLADA even EPIC added it to their ULTRA FAMOUS Unreal Engine, Animation is not only TV Series or Film work, this could also mean lots of MOD guys using Messiah to get animation into the engine instead of Maya/Max with Actor X…

PMG had issues before with FBX being expensive, well it´s NOT the case anymore, so make this a TOP Priority on that list of yours…please…

#12

is this becoming a religious thread?? :smiley:

Ok seriously, I hope pmg jumps on this. Collada support would be very much appreciated.

#13

As much as I like seeing render engine enhancements, I’ll 2nd Sil3’s statement above. This is too big an oppertunity to let it pass by.

#14

Agreed. You need bone data to be exported out to even be considered for game work.

#15

Sounds all very interesting! I guess we’ll have to look into that! :argh:
Hehehe…let’s see. Thanx for the suggestion and the bold arguments! For the longest time I would have anticipated more proprietary means of animation for games, but I do know very much that that usually only refers to exporter plugins. Coming to a common format I thought is a younger phenomenon and a perfect idea for us to join into! Games have long outweighted the traditional animated entertainment media, no doubt, so yeah…it’s not the future, it’s actually now. So, yeahee, certainly on our plate, too! :scream:

:thumbsup:

#16

absolutely, knowing that sometime in the future i could use messiah seamlessly on any application that supports this format natively, the possibilities become endless. I can also see alot of people who did not consider messiah previously, being able to see its power and apply it to an application they are already comfortable with. being the first here can certainly pay back substantially.

#17

Awesome news Taron! I really feel that this is the best format to support if you plan on supporting any. Messiah is already priced as one of the most accessible animation packages out there for even the hobbiest user. You get a top notch animation toolset for such a low price, that gamers, modders and even developers will definitely take notice provided the tools are there for them to get content out of messiah more easily.

#18

It would be great if Messiah could support FBX and Collada, it would increase its usefulness 100 fold.

#19

Here, here.
I’m in full agreement.

#20

One thing I would like to say though, is I’d like to see pmg straighten things out with messiah first, clear out all those bugs and dust off the various blocks. Make it shine, then have some focus on FBX and collada import/export. Even if its a few months from now…priced at $299 people would jump on messiah for that capability. Unfortunately…I’ll have to add n-gon support should be in there too, as much as I dislike n-gons its become a industry requirement…