The Populate toolset lets you add animated characters to your scene quickly and easily. You can generate crowds of these characters and animate crowd movement using a system of delegates and procedural behaviors. You use the animated skeletons to drive the movement of geometry, thus creating virtual characters. It is an environment in which you can quickly and easily build skeletons (also known as character rigs) and then animate them, thus creating motion sequences.
The character studio feature set in 3ds Max provides professional tools for animating 3D characters. CAT facilitates character rigging, nonlinear animation, animation layering, motion-capture import, and muscle simulation. Also, the Motion Flow feature offers randomized script generation, procedural transitions, and more.ĬAT (Character Animation Toolkit) is a character-animation plug-in for 3ds Max. Its features include procedural footstep (walk) creation, freeform animation, a specialized animation editor called Workbench, and a non-linear animation feature called Motion Mixer (also available for general animation). The third character studio component is Crowd, which enables procedural animation of large groups of characters with behaviors such as avoidance, random motion, and following a surface.īiped is the most advanced and powerful character studio component. Physique can be used with rig objects other than Biped, and offers features such as user-definable rigid and deforming sections of the skin. Also part of character studio is the Physique modifier for skinning character rigs. Last, CAT provides muscle and muscle strand objects for simulating character musculature.Ĭharacter studio comprises an extensive character-animation toolset that can work with multi-legged characters but is intended primarily for use with bipedal rigs hence the name of its basic rig object: Biped. CAT also supports blending between FK and IK for custom control. The latter context supports color-coding of layers so it’s easy to see which layer is contributing to the motion at any given moment. CATMotion is best suited for modifying cyclical motion in real time by adjusting parameters for body parts such as the pelvis parameters include Twist, Roll, Pitch, Lift, and Push.Īnother powerful but relatively easy-to-use feature of CAT is the layering system, available both in CATMotion (for individual body-part cycles) and at the full-rig level, with keyframed weighting at both levels. You can easily animate these along paths with no foot sliding using the graph-based CATMotion editor. Among the rigs built into CAT are a number of multi-limbed creatures such as a dragon with four legs and two wings, a spider, and a centipede with 18 legs. With CAT, you can more easily rig and animate multi-legged and non-humanoid characters it is also capable of animating humanoid characters quite realistically. However, if you’re pressed for time, read the following quick comparison and then look over the help for both systems.ĬAT, while quite advanced, is in some ways the simpler of the two character-animation systems. The best way to determine which is best suited to a particular project you’re working on is to learn both, and then make the decision based on your experiences.