Biped is stupid, so I switched to bones. Bones are stupid, so I switched to CAT. Now I'm learning CAT is stupid. Or is it that Autodesk products in general are stupid?
Here's my thing: Bones and bipeds are able to use coloration and keyframes normally, allowing you to set up helpers and keyframes... normally, but bipeds are garbage, full of jank, and hard to customize, and bones made me waste an entire week of man hours only for me to end up discovering, after I'd finished skinning, that the way bones have to be mirrored and have their pivots rotated, caused symmetry problems in my rig, and every time I had to delete a helper, my model's symmetry would drift further and further away from perfect t-pose, by micro amounts, which I was unknowingly cementing into my rig every time I froze all transforms for the helpers.
I had to start over, and I switched to CAT. CAT bones are faster to set up than both biped and bones, which makes them the superior rigging system, save for one small giant detail. Animation mode. I spent half an hour carefully devising a color gradient system for bones, where the color would change further along the bone chain, because my model is a little on the complex side, and has many moving parts.
I then put myself through the trouble of figuring out how to use IK with CAT, and set up constraints and helpers, only to find out I need to toggle on something called Animation Mode, in order to start keyframing with CAT, and upon toggling on Animation Mode, discovered hours of careful color coordination and helper placement specifically to make my model, covered in individually-moving spikes, easier to animate, was all wasted effort when switching to Animate Mode deformed my model out of T-Pose, thanks to the helpers, and wiped all the color coordination back to default, because apparently I can't do anything in an Autodesk product without it being openly hostile towards completion of my projects.
To prove to the 3/4ths of myself thoroughly convinced 3DsMax was a complete waste of my my money, and 15 years of my life I'll never get back, that this program is still worth throwing myself at, over and over, like an insane person hoping next time I start it up it won't be complete trash, I'd like to be able to bypass Animate Mode and just use standard keyframing like biped and bones can, so I can use helpers and colors without everything breaking.
