New Animation Company software advice

[kopperdrake]

Can I pick brains please? I've a friend who's starting a new character animation company and is after advice on software to use. They're Mac based and as far as they know they have the option of Maya, C4D, Lightwave. I'd love to recommend LW but until the CA tools are upgraded I feel I can't. Does anyone know of a good pipeline that would work?

[SP00]

Tell him to get both Lightwave and Maya, because you can model things very fast and quickly with Modeler, and get Maya for Character animation. The speed in modeling will save his company lots of money to offset the cost of Maya.

[Phil]

Mind you, there is no PointOven for Mac, and no really useful intermediate format given the ancient version of FBX available for LW. The pipeline between LW and Maya might be a bit more painful due to this, especially if they might want to render in LW.

Getting models out of LW via OBJ would be OK, though.

The other option would be MotionBuilder. That be be used in combination with Maestro, and also via the FBX import, to push character animation into LW.

Still, if they have no existing investment and are after a single package solution, my opinion would be to simply go to Maya. It costs more at every stage, but the productivity gains should pay this off reasonably quickly. This on the basis that there is no indication of an imminent upgrade to the animation and setup implementations in LW. If advanced character animation is the main aspect, LW is really out of the game.

[Castius]

I'd say it all depend on the artist you have available. And the size of the Team. As well as the animation you need to produce. A small team with less technical artist will probable do ok with LW and Maestro. Or have a good LW rigger than can give you a good simple rig. The same can be said for maya with a small team. This is why it's more important to know the skill level of the artist you have then the software.

[flakester]

I have seen a little bit of information about the possibility of running Messiah through virtualisation on a mac, something to do with Parallels¿? I cannot find anything on it right now though.

Well, you know I'd always be up for promoting LW + Messiah!!

Until Messiah is fully ported for Mac (ok, not sure that it ever really be....) then I'd have to suggest Maya for your friend. From my limited time with the app, the CA tools were ~aprettyprettycool.... my only nark with Maya is that it looks like someone fired a cartoon bazooka at the user interface! :p

Hope that helps.

flakester.

[bobakabob]

Just tried the demo of Messiah and it's fantastic - so fast and intuitive with excellent (and entertaining) tutorials. The only downer is (like Layout) you can't select individual vertices to improve deformations but the bones are so flexible it shouldn't be a big problem.

Many pro animators here, like Pooby rate XSI highly for animation.

Edit - Ooops - I should read posts in greater depth - missed the Mac part!

[kopperdrake]

Thanks for the feedback so far guys :) Maya did seem the way to go in terms of all-round package, but as far as I know they're not technical animators. The thing putting them off Maya was the pricing policy, plus they'd tried the demo on a Mac and they weren't too impressed with how it ran (not sure of the reasons why). They'd heard of Modo and really liked the interface, until I mentioned the animation restrictions. Cinema 4D is no longer the cheaper option it used to be, so apart from Lightwave I couldn't think of any other option, unless they wanted to run bootcamp on the Macs.

If it helps, my friend setting the company up is an old Lightwave modeller, though she hasn't modelled for some years. The first animator onboard is a Max user, mainly CS stuff I think, though I'm not sure what other packages she's used. The Mac bias is coming from my friend's other half, an out and out Mac-head, though I'm beginning to question whether it's a wise move. The work will be fairly intensive character animation for educational DVD. As far as I'm aware, to make things easy on yourself, Messiah and Lightwave are meant to be an okay combination, though PC based as Flakester points out. I've had some suggestions on using IKBoost and Lightwave though I've no personal experience with it, but that would solve the platform dependence.

I'd dearly love to know when the CA tools in Lightwave are due to be released and what they entail - it could be good for me (and other local LW artists) if they went Lightwave, but they're going for funding and need to get their decisions made.

[kopperdrake]

Ooh - just noticed Castius' suggestion of Maestro. I'll have a better look at that combo as well!

[Sande]

I wouldn't count LightWave out - actually I would recommend it, possibly coupled with that already mentioned Maestro. In my opinion LightWave offers, especially for a small studio, pretty good price/performance ratio when compared for example to Maya.

Even if LW's own CA-tools would need some upgrading, CA is still very much possible and there are many people out there doing it.

[Steamthrower]

Chunderburger, that's probably pretty good advice as far as 3D software availability goes, but Macs also have FCP, Shake, and a host of other VFX-related software that's cheaper and (usually) easier to learn than the PC equivalents of D2 Nuke, Digital Fusion, etc. I think D2 Nuke costs around $5000 whereas Shake costs $500.

Plus the Mac Pro is one of the fastest factory computers you can get.

[jin choung]

well who said that you can't use macs for 2d stuff?

no reason to have a single os throughout the shop.... especially since 3d options really open up (and become much less painful in soooooo many ways) if you just go pc.

so pcs for 3d and macs for 2d. it will certainly be cheaper as well.

jin

[Sande]

...and couple of jets for business trips! ;)

[jin choung]

? ummm, last time i checked, pcs were considerably cheaper than macs.

jin

[Sande]

Well, the title asked for software advice and kopperdrake said they are Mac based... You could probably build a PC with cheaper components, but I don't see lots of savings to be made when switching OS and comps just for, what, XSI? Well, coupled then with Windows, also.
Then again, we may just have a different view on how big the new company will be - I had a small startup in my mind with limited resources.

[Sarford]

hmm, I'm a hard core mac fanboy and I was in the same position: what CA software to choose wich runs on a mac. But after searching and trying demo's I switched to a PC for CA.
If you're gonna start a CA company I think its smarter too search for the best software for you and base your OS on that instead of the other way around.

I would say take a good look at XSI essentials, its with hair and syflex and has some of the best CA tools in the business for now.

That said, I'm very confident that LightWave wil get good CA tools. It has some capable tools already but you have to be fairly technical to get it (in my opinion).

[Steamthrower]

A much cheaper alternative, Jin, would be Boot Camp. No need to spend twice the amount of money on equipment when the budget could go somewhere else.

[kopperdrake]

Thanks again people - I have to admit my initial reaction was xsi on a PC for a reasonable cost/performance ratio, so they could always go the bootcamp route if they insist on buying Macs, the dual quad-core 3ghz is still competitively priced afaik. I believe the initial size of the company will only be 2 or 3, but I'm not entirely sure how large they expect it to get - maybe up to around 5 people I think. I'll point them at the demo of LW as a starter, I think they need to spend a bit of time looking at the various bits of software out there, and CA is going to be the crux of the work.

[AbnRanger]

I'd say LW, Modo, and Maestro or Messiah would be the most cost-effective combination for an upstart like this. You have so many rendering (got to include Fprime here) and CA options. Plus, by the time they get up to speed with those, LW will probably have it's new CA tools.

C4D R 10.5 is extremely impressive too, but honestly...based on the fact that your primary animator already has experience in Max with Character Studio, I would be leaning heavily toward going in that direction using Bootcamp (used it on a project earlier in the year...works fine...network rendering and all) if they insist on going with MAC's. Di-O-Matic's has some nice facial animation plugins for Max, that might be worth looking into:
http://www.di-omatic.com/products/Plugins/CharPack/
Once you have a copy of Max, it is actually the cheapest program to keep up to date each year, with it's subscription program. One major downside to XSI is that you have to pay for extra rendering nodes, whereas 3ds Max has unlimited Mental Ray nodes

Then regarding compositors, I'd have to recommend Combustion since it is so tightly integrated with Max (also works on PC and Mac) and you can use it as an interactive painting program with Max (similar to Deep Paint 3D or Body Paint)...costs about $775.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=5574967