Animation companion for Modo 202?

#21

Jacobo3d
Interesting idea and good, I agree. I too would enjoy lighting and rendering an animation made somewhere else in Modo. The idea has been presented before at Luxology forums, I think. Perhaps you should add your support for it there.

LetterRip & Apollux
Thank you for the detailed info. Sorry for the very late reply.

Yes, my requirements are varied. I’m not looking for all bels and whistles though. Skin sliding and such would be nice, but what I really want is a comfortable to use, stable and fast enough animation software - including cloth and muscle. And if things like cloth have to be done with tricks, I prefer the tricks to be easy and functional.

Maybe Blender then. Still haven’t looked into it but will in coming months.

#22

[b]Sleepyghost

[/b]I’ve suggested that idea to Luxology, and it seems like there are good news about it for the next modo version (and even more :)).
For now, there’s a plugin called Frame Runner that reads MDD files into modo (somebody just told me that when I’ve suggested the MDD thing in the Luxology forum… I didn’t know it :))

#23

Thanks Jacobo3d. Sounds interesting and, well, very good. I didn’t know about the Frame Runner, either. Sweet :slight_smile:

#24

I am afraid that there is no easy, fast and comfortable to use cloth (not to mention muscle system) software avaliable in off-the shelf aplications, especially cheap ones - except if all you need to make are waving flags and bicep demos, then anything will do. The best thing which you can buy is syflex (which is pretty close to what you described as fast and comfortable) and lately maya ncloth. As for muscle, Michael Comet cmuscle has good opinion and I’ve heard good things about Max’s CAT plugin, but never tested it myself.

If you just want to rig and animate your model, XSI Foundation will give you best bang for the buck, but rigging in XSI didn't change much since version 4.0 (which is good thing). Anyway if technical aspects of rigging scared you before, technical aspects of muscle and cloth simualtions/rigging will be a nightamre for you.. on top of rigging.

I think what you need is some sort of Max's biped or equivalent plugin.
#25

Rendering in Carrara is very slow. Sort of defeats the purpose of using modo.

#26

Thanks Mdee. That was one of the most to-the-point answers around. Yes, do I need a bit more than muscle demos and waving flags, but at the moment it looks most likely that I will dress the characters to suit the tools I have - in effect do what I can with simulation, loose what clothes I can, and maybe do some with bones. For the muscles I don’t need anything overly fancy, just decent.

It was not the rigging that scared me as such, it was more the my feel of Softimage XSI back then. Somehow my memory is in style of: “set dependency here, in this submenu do this and, please remember, here also… oh and don’t forget this and this”. Maybe it was the teaching, maybe it was me jumping into this school in the middle of the term… Anyway should give it a try again.

Max’s Bibed does help a ton indeed, but also I had none of the trouble to adding my own wings&hands-rig with slider-controls and whatnot to it. Yet I don’t own Max now and don’t plan on purchasing just for the biped.

I’m tickled by Messiah now. Don’t know if I’ll end up with that in the end, though.

#27

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