ok … i m just wondering while watching people shifting to cat heavily in production what is the destiny of riggers , will be some day when no such title ? it may be shallow sight of me but this annoying me as i m always developing rigging tools and scripts at some point felt that i m making non sense work , so what do you think ?
CAT is it game over for riggers
shalabology
#3
that means it may happen already !! oh my god i should search for something other than being rigger 
mrfred
#4
1-I dont know any animator that really love cat… If they have to use a pre-made system they’ll use the biped
2-Did the biped stole the riggers jobs?
3-I dont know any studio that use CAT ( im sure they’re is some tho), they’ll rather use custom rig or biped for most of them.
1+2+3 = not scared at all 
dunkelzahn
#5
I second mrfred´s arguments. While CAT might be a neat rig builder, it will nowhere be able to replace custom rigs. In my opinion, however, there is a market developing out there for customized and tweaked CAT rigs.
Small CG shops who might be able to dabble with CAT won´t be able go any further than easy out of the box rigging tasks. once they reach a certain level, they will encounter critical problems. But they will have established CAT as their animation tool of choice in house. And that´s where an experienced rigger will be able to dictate the price for helping people out of their CAT problems ;).
Cheers
Chris
eek
#6
No, it will never happen. Like minded technical people will always want to understand and develop their knowledge.
I used CAT on a previous production with a very tight schedule - it’s a great system to steer a lot of animators to using a common process, and makes debugging there scene relatively painless. But its got some general serious issues that you’ll need to build a suite of tools to work around.
The major issues are its id’s which are order based (first come first serve) , parenting, and the internal parent transform system (funky fk/ik switching). I can see the reasons for them but because there embedded under layers of complexity make its pretty hard to debug.
CAT’s layer system is awesome, and this with the layer_float() controller makes the ability to build your own rigs using all of the animation saving, abs/rel layers etc pretty easy.
The capture system is awesome when compared to closed animation transfer tools. It just stores the relative offset so loading motion capture data’s a snap. - But once again you’ll have to put the time in to support it .
Cactus_Dan
#7
Howdy,
From what I’ve seen of automated rigging systems, a lot of the non-riggers still can’t create decent rigs with them, so I doubt they’ll ever replace the “job” of rigging. 
Adios,
Cactus Dan
spacegroo
#9
We used CAT on our last project (using Max 2009). It definitely has a lot of advantages, mainly that we were able to get rigs built reasonably quickly and had layer management, pose management, mocap importing all available to us. But…it has its share of quirks and bugs. The trick for us was to discover the bugs and develop work-arounds for them.
My major gripes with CAT in 2012 is that lots of old bugs were fixed and replaced with newer bugs. That, and it still feels rather slapdash in its interface. I’d love to see CAT get some serious focus on stability as well as a facelift.
hamedPk
#11
:wavey:
I am An Advance Character
I Worked With Character Animation Toolkit(Cat) 1.0 To V3.3 And Till Now In Few Years For Character Rigging …
Cat Is Powerful Base Character Rig Like Biped But With More Option And Felexibility In Animate Characters, I Rigged Many Character With Base Cat 8 Days …
Thats Not Easy …Trust Me
My Cat Character Rigs Demo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZfGxafkxak&feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ox0j8HNTN8&feature=relmfu
MattRennie
#12
Thats news to me!
I found CAT too painful to work with, due to its own idiosyncracies so I don’t touch it unless I absolutely have to. I much prefer making my own rigs, that way any idiosyncracies are of my own making!
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