What do you think of CAT?

[Anonymous]

I wanted to be the first to this new forum! Tell us what you think about your exploration of CAT and if it will fit your workflow.

[Anonymous]

It's awesome! The rigging tools, the layers, the procedural walk - all is great. The only problems I've had is when there are lots of other stuff in the scene, but when I started to animate in one scene, and then pointcache the animation and do my FX in another scene, with just the mesh loaded with the pointcache, everything ran smoothly. The other weak point is the documentation, but I know you AME guys will fix that. Free CAT (and consequentially, Puppetshop) is one of the coolest things Max has gotten recently, congratulations!

[MarcusKenyon5375]

It's really nice and easy to use... I've been involved with Max from a modelling and rendering perspective for ages now and have never really put 100% into learning animation in MAX (I hire others who are better than me to do that) but I have really taken to CAT and it appears loads more intutive than the the 'normal' MAX biped/rigging route. Really intrigued as to how it'll work as I get deeper - i'll report back after I have spent a little while longer using it 🙂

[Anonymous]

Yes, our AEs were very excited by it - and they are usually a pretty jaded bunch of experts. They were surprised it was so easy to use and powerful too. We're busy making videos and cleaning up the wiki, but check out Louis Marcoux's blog for some more information on using CAT. I think he posted some videos too.

area.autodesk.com/forum/index.php/blogs_louis/blog_detail/cat_overview_videos_on_louis/

[Anonymous]

I understand the people at autodesk have to get up to speed using cat but why havent you tapped into the community of people that were already using cat for the video tutorials

[Anonymous]

Probably for a number of reasons:
a) we don't know about it
b) we don't have the rights to reuse their work
c) we're scrambling to do as much as we can - which requires focus
d) it isn't always the easiest thing to reuse someone else's work versus creating a more controlled environement (we know we have all rights to all the materials)

But, shout out if you know of some great content we should look at and should make people aware of. I'm happy to blog it.

[Anonymous]

one more question can you add a cat showcase or wip area

[Anonymous]

Idea behind CAT is great. I'm very happy that crashing is very rare compared to cat 1.X and 2.X.
Only problem and it's a big one, are the bugs and weird behavior under random conditions. What I mean by that is that sometimes things work and other time they don't. For example pose loading seems to be very buggy. Sometimes it will load the pose correctly, sometimes it will screw up the whole rig. Same with layer collapsing. It would be great if there would be some SP release for CAT with these bugs fixed.

[Anonymous]

I've just been to the official CAT website and had a look at some of the videos in the gallery. It seems very good. Does CAT also support facial animation and lip syncing too?

[Anonymous]

if you' ve been using since version 1 you should be aware of things like that being addressed in subsequent releases cat 2, 2.2, 2.5, 2 point whatever. its the same with 3 every version has several versions of each number where those problems are usually ironed out. you should point out what operating system your using so they can recreate the problem.

to mattn yes it does it has for some time there is a video for version 3 on it. I believe in the tutorial and tips section

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply tyree. I'll check that out.

[joshpurple]

Thank You Ken! 🙂 (Man, I have got to check in on the AREA a lot more often 😄 . First I've seen of this forum, -glad to see it! )

Great to see so many familiar faces here! 🙂

I've always enjoyed CAT. For anyone new to creating rigs, those who don't know MaxScript, and for speed in creating animation, I'd guess CAT will be well liked. I can't say enough good things about CAT. Philip Taylor's work (and all of the CAT team) have my deep thanks and appreciation.

The resources in Max for rigging now are brilliant; MaxScript Custom rigging, Biped, Puppetshop, CAT, PFlow (for creating footprints that imprint in the ground, and LOTS more with PFlow), not to forget the pipeline to MotionBuilder (or even XSI & Maya 🙂 ), -and I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton.

It might be cool to see a CAT rig Library? (maybe I just have not found that thread yet 😄 ) Here's a very simple CAT octopus rig 🙂 , zip file; http://jp.joshpurple.com/Octopus002.ZIP Created using 3ds Max 2009 32bit, and CAT3.2 (it has worked for me with CAT3.3) It's really only good for just hanging there and flapping it's tentacles, & the model could be a lot better (Skin job too... ). Glad to share it 🙂 .

The biggest issue I've seen with CAT is when the 'FK Spine' a.k.a the 'Keyframed' spine is used. I think a great part of CAT is the procedural animation, and the FK spine is not made to work w/ CAT's procedural animation (CATMotion). To help in avoiding this issue, you can use two or more CAT rigs for one model (a CAT rig for the upper body, and a CAT rig for the lower body. It's not a perfect solution, but it opens up a lot of additional options for rigging).

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( Edit / p.s. that's an animated gif. If you click on the image you should be able to see the animation, I hope 🙂 )

[Anonymous]

for the uninformed josh can get busy with rig creation similar to the way a sketch artist can sketch whatever their looking at. he can throw those rigs together with the quickness. I always use the two rig approach myself its helps solve a lot of skinning issues.

here is something for you to look at josh not as interesting as the octopuss but alright

some motion switching, hit an image
http://bleed.110mb.com/motionswitching2.htm


you will need adobe shockwave, should auto install

whats interesting about this is what you cant see the process there are more animations than those few once I got to 500 keyframes I stopped extending the timeline and turned off the layers i wasnt using, and added layers on top of the deactived layers in the same timeframe the deactivated layers exist in. you can do this almost indefinately. adding layer on top of layer where another layer already exist in the timeline.

[joshpurple]

Thanks for sharing Tyree, and Thank You for the kind words 🙂 .

[leeman]

I found the following information helpful the keyframed spine option (not sure just how relevant this post is since I'm very new on the CAT learning curve:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwZtjV07vnA Sneak Peek: 3ds Max CAT to MotionBuilder and Maya.