But maybe you want to apply the animation of a dragon you have done 2 years ago to a pigeon you have to do for your client today. Sometimes there is no reason for doing this of course, why would you need animation of human rig applied to a deer rig? Well, maybe you don’t, but it still works. After you have done your animation you can load it on almost any rig even if it’s completely different. I have even done a tutorial on how to create an octopus rig in 10 minutes, you can watch it here.ĬAT has one of the best transfers of animations from one rig to another. Even facial rigs (however they are a bit more complicated – as all facial rigs usually are). Fish, birds, octopus, a dragon, 1st person weapon rig, whatever you like. CAT especially excels in creating creature rigs, anything you can imagine. Let’s take a closer look.ĬAT is really optimized for creating regular rigs really fast. When people talk about 3ds Max they talk about biped at most, which is an old and bad system. But CAT is heavily undervalued and underused animation system, and nobody even mentions it usually. Yes, if you want to do insane custom rig with a lot of scripting involved, you should use Maya in my opinion. I would say Maya is generally the best for using regular bone rigs, it has the largest animation community, best tools and Python scripting language.ĬAT is heavily undervalued and underused animation system, and nobody even mentions it usually.īut! 3ds Max has CAT. You have plugins, scripts and tools for them. I believe most of you encountered regular bones already, they work mostly the same in all the softwares, they are the most flexible and can be used to create any rig.

When you talk about animating in 3ds Max you have to differentiate between regular bones, biped and CAT. However, I have a strong believe that those people who say this never actually used CAT more than for a few hours at most.

Of course, there are people who animate in 3ds Max but the general consensus is that if you want to animate, learn Maya.

Generally artists use Maya or MotionBuilder for animation and 3ds Max is kind of overlooked. It is not very known in the animation circles which constantly surprises me. CAT or Character animation toolkit is a former plugin for 3dsmax which was integrated and built-into 3dsmax since version 2010.

3d studio max animation