Game Development Community

Life without Character Studio? How??

by Nmuta Jones · in Artist Corner · 02/04/2009 (7:32 pm) · 3 replies

We have recently moved and the company I work for now does not have a Max license.

I am looking into other modeling apps, and yes, I am aware of Blender, Wings, and the myriad of other modeling apps out there. However, I am MOST interested in XSI (the free version).

My big question, that I cannot get answered, is: how in the world to people manage WITHOUT character studio in game development? The ability to create one motion on a skeleton, and then export as a .bip is priceless. I can't imagine making every single character animation from scratch. Is this how the 'everyone else' does it who does not have Character Studio?

XSI looks good and from the way things look here, the exporter seems to keep getting better and better. Does using XSI mean being forced into having to go back to animating every single character by hand, for each separate animation?? Certain animations, like run cycles, are more difficult to do by hand than they look. And to do a new run cycle for each of seven characters in a game seems kind of daunting.

Max is amazing and it's all I'm used to other than having toyed with a Cinema4D trial years back. If worst comes to worst, I may have to purchase another license of Max on my own, but the expense is a serious factor here.

Please advise.

Thanks.
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Associate Matt Summers
Dark Industries
#1
02/04/2009 (11:05 pm)
Well, if you work for a company and are doing commercial work that pretty much excludes the free version of XSI. Motion capture is a decent way to do basic animation on the cheap. To date Most of major animation automation tools are pretty expensive.

In reality 3ds Max is reasonably priced if you start to look at the cost of animation automation tools. Especially considering now that AutoDesk owns Softimage CAT and it is free to all 3ds Max Subscription customers.

Things like Motion Builder and Natural Motion Endorphin are really great tools but are also an additional $3,000-$10,000 on top of your 3d app cost.

But if you look at it from a time savings stand point, over the course of a typical project that investment will save you a lot of time. Rarely do the words "save time" and "inexpensive" go hand in hand either. Free tools generally lack automation, if they had all the automation tools they probably wouldn't be free! ;-)

That is not to say that you can't do great things with free tools, it just means it will probably take more effort to achieve the same results.

Torque Owner Rex
BrokeAss Games
#2
02/05/2009 (5:22 am)
There are other applications that perform 'Adaptive Scaling'...to motion files, it will take working each 'new' program to establish the workflow needed. Not to be harsh; there is 'life' beyond AutoDesk and 3DS Max......especially if you are NOT the license holder! I 'evaluated' Max when first exposed to this engine. I did not like the way the shapes needed to be hacked together to export. The whole 'two' figures in the Scene to get one single output, b'ah. Skin modifier flakey as heck[Max5 at the time], let's not even go into "UnmessDTS"....after that, I looked to whatever program I could find that did the process without such caveats.

I go out of my way to evaluate as many 3D applications as I possibly can, as I consider myself a "3D graphic artist", to me meaning: I can take about any program and make it's output, 'meaningful'.

Good luck 'branching out'!

Torque Owner Nmuta Jones
#3
02/05/2009 (7:05 am)
@Rex and Matt

I think you're right. The best investment would be to just purchase another independent license of 3dsMax. The time saved in the process would eventually pay for itself. It's really not that expensive when compared to all of the other costs associated with small to medium scale game development.

Thanks, good comments.