MB, Life Forms, and Endorphin

#1

Am I missing something or are these the basic 3 players on the market? The good thing about all of them is that you can try before you buy. On some you can even take the time to learn it very well before putting down the bucks. There is also great price differences between them and feature differences.

You have MotionBuilder which has a time unlimited FREE Learning Edition.

http://www.alias.com/glb/eng/products-services/product_details.jsp;jsessionid=QHMSGZW0E2F5LQCLCWSCM44AJMK0KJVC?productId=2300004

You have Life Forms which has a 20 day demo version.

http://www.credo-interactive.com/trial/download_info.html

And you have Endorphin which also has a time unlimited FREE Learning Edition.

http://www.naturalmotion.com/pages/le.htm

#2

MB and Endorphine are not in the same bracket look HERE

For character animation MB is pretty well the defacto standard…there is also Messiah. Other than that many people still animate right in their native SW ie XSI Lgitwave etc. Most have non linear character animation systems installed or can use use 3rd party plugins and extension SW that augment character animation in their packages.

#3

So then it would just be MotionBuilder and Life Forms that are similar?

#4

yeah Lifeforms would be similar to MB, Messiah

#5

I thought Messiah was more of a complete 3d program like Lightwave?

#6

Messiah doesn’t have a modeler.

Megaldon

#7

So you can create motion capture files and render but you can’t create content? Hummm, sounds sort of like Poser…

#8

Well… it definately ain’t Poser! :slight_smile: Although I prefer Motion Builder, Messiah (for me) runs a close second. It’s VERY powerful software and although I like Poser, it’s leaps and bounds above it - you really can’t compare the two. (IMHO of course.)

Megalodon

#9

Is Messiah well documented? I found MotionBuilder hard to learn do to lack of tutorial material.

#10

Lack of tutorial material? As I reccall, the MotionBuilder CD’s come with lots of tutorials. Also, check out 3Dbuzz.com - they’ve got lots of video tutorials, though I believe they are for primarily MB5.5. In fact it was because of all of the available video tutorials I ended up upgrading! I’m not exactly sure where these tutorials are on the site - before they revamped the site they were VERY easy to find.

Megalodon

#11

Your right! It did come with a CD packed with tutorials. On the website there were actually a whole lot of tutorials also but are no longer available. I just wish they would repost them for those of us who still use 5.5 and hopefully will see an advantage to upgrading to 8 when it is released.

#12

I see Motionbuilder as very much an app for companies rather than hobbyists. It’s fantastic for working with motion capture and it’s got a very nice set of tools for keyframe animation, but really it’s set up to be part of a pipeline rather than a tool you might use on it’s own. If you’re going to be working with mocap data alot then Motionbuilder is definitely an app you’d want to look at, but otherwise i’d suggest working with Maya, XSI or Max, they’re just far more complete packages.

As for documentation and tutorials, it’s true that there aren’t really any books or web tutorials on how to use Motionbuilder, but as has already been mentioned, the official tutorials, user guide and training videos are all you really need.

#13

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