3D character animation software?

Rednroll wrote on 3/24/2005, 2:11 AM
I'm looking for software recommendations. I've seen some software a few years back that allowed you to create 3D characters, unfortunately I forgot the name of it, although "3D animator" comes to mind.

Let me further explain what I want to do. As I've mentioned many times I want to get more involved in the video side of Vegas. So I figured what better way to learn than to create something that will be fun to work on? This forum to me is like a soap opera with all the different characters we have here, where posts become filled with drama time and time again. So what better story line to base my short animated films after than all the fine characters we have right here in this forum. I'm thinking along the lines of creating short stories kind of laid out like South Park meets the Vegas Video forum. So of course the first thing I'll have to do is create the characters and be able to move them and have each character be able to interact with one another, hopefully with a blue screen type backdrop. From there I'll create back drop scenary and mesh the two together in Vegas. Then I'll create character voices add sound FX's etc. to make the characters come alive. Finally, I'll render it as an Mpeg-1 and share it with all of you for your critique and of course I'll want to make DVD's so they can be viewed on my home TV, so the picture quality of the characters should be a concern. I'm thinking a simple .GIF animator wouldn't work for TV quality resolution.

What kind of spawned this idea was Muttley's short film polking fun at BillyBoy. Then that same week, I was over a friends house and we where playing the video game Tiger Woods PGA 2005. In that game, you can create your own characters. My friend and I had a ball, because while we where playing the game, the wives where in another room, so we where creating our wives in the video game. It was very simple to create characters that resembled our wives, and of course us being men we kept altering other things to accentuate certain body parts. We kept calling our wives in and saying,"Honey, you want to see what you look like if you gained 200lbs?" "How about some plastic surgery?" So if I could find something like that, that is that simple to create a character, then be able to animate it that would be ideal.

Here's what I found so far:
http://www.reallusion.com/itsme

That one interests me because I can use actual pictures of someone's face and put it on an animated body.

Here's a couple others I looked at:
http://www.credo-interactive.com/
http://www.wordware.com/cartoon/

Does anyone have any other recommendations, where the software has a very simple interface like the Tiger Woods game I described and will ultimately get me to the final end short video?

Red

Comments

argyll wrote on 3/24/2005, 5:41 AM
There is Poser by Curiouslabs (curiouslabs.com) a human figure pose and animation program.

Also there is DAZStudio (free!) by DAZ3D (DAZ3D.com) which is similar to Poser.
DAZ3D also makes MIMIC which takes a voice wav file and create the mouth and facile animation for both Poser and DAZStudio.

Doug C.
Rednroll wrote on 3/24/2005, 5:50 AM
"Poser"....ahhhh yes, that's actually the name of the one I was trying to think of, and your Mimic recommendation souds good too. Thanks for the recommendations I'll definately check those out.
wakiyan wrote on 3/24/2005, 5:59 AM
When's the audition ?

Jon
Rednroll wrote on 3/24/2005, 10:35 AM
"When's the audition ?"

LOL!!! Auditions have already been held, if you read this forum a lot you already know who those popular actors are. That doesn't mean, we can't have a guest star appear here and there if we find a new personality jump out of the wood work. Of course a representation of some of the Sony folks will be there as well. I think, they'll be part of the town police force. You'll most likely see a resemblance of SonyChaboud carrying around a belt holster full of locks when attending the town meeting discussions. Some of my favorite characters that have already made the audition cuts are DSE, BillyBoy, John Cline, Jay Gladwell, and of course the town jester Grazie.
Orcatek wrote on 3/24/2005, 10:43 AM
Check out Animation Master - http://www.hash.com.

Takes a while to learn, but does some interesting things. I really like the spline based images, as there never is an issue with polygon count.

Lightwave is a killer modeler, but not the best animator. Of course it is pricey.

TruSpace from http://www.caligari.com/ is good for stuff. Very different program. They used have early versions for free as a download.

Poser is fun for what it does - mostly people. A few animals and fantasy characters.

Kanst wrote on 3/24/2005, 12:19 PM
Some useful feachures can give Heroglyph 2.0
And it has a funny bug yet: (don't kill me, please!)
- set computer date, for example, from 2005 to 2015
- install trial, but not run Heroglyph automatically at the end of installation
- manually run program and immediately press Cancel
- set date back to 2005
Now you have a 10 year trial period.
:)