Best tool for character animation on a low budget

#1 I'm no animator, but I hear good things about CharacterFX

#2 There's that, and there's also gameSpace, which is fairly cheap, exports to DTS/DIF(through soon-to-be released plugins from Caligari, as well as from myself and others). gameSpace is basically trueSpace 6.6, with game export functionality and less NURBS tools(didn't really use them anyway). Give it a look at www.caligari.com. Hope that helps.

#3 Oh no! i got truespace! was it better if i got gamespace? what about CharacterFX, does it have an exporter for torque?

EDIT: spelling

#4 I've got CharacterFX (Demo) and although it looks like it will do a good job creating single animations, it appears to have a fairly clunky interface which I've not managed to get on with yet. It does support some kind of scripting though which may prove useful. It seems to work well with Milkshape as long as you export the models to text format. It can then export the animation back again so milkshape can import them and then export to torque. It doesn't appear that characterFX can export directly to torque.

Does anyone have a tool, homegrown or commercial which can take a bunch of milkshape animations and create a single file with all of the special materials applied?

To Ted: I've used Truespace quite a bit in the past and I like its modelling tools, but I don't know if it can support multiple animations in the same file. Or will it let you create dsq files?

#5 IMO the animation tools in blender are the best i've used in a while :)

(I have not tried many commerical tools so i don't know what they are all like in terms of animation)

k

#6 Well, I'm finding my technique of animating the various sequences for my models as different files useful. I'm making good progress and it's nice & easy to work with the walk ,run , death sequences etc... There's a problem though.

I thought I'd be able to export as Milkshape ASCII files and simply append my animations onto the end of a master file with a little tweaking of frame numbers and add a few special materials in order to get the animations into the same file, reimport the file, export to DTS and Bob's your uncle. But there's a problem. The Milkshape ASCII format puts all of the changes for a bone together so all changes to the left arm are in one lump of text and the right arm come after in another lump of text. This will make appending my other animations very difficult.

So My question has changed a little.

In the absence of a homegrown or commercial milkshape animation splicing utility (and without me having to invest a lot of time in understanding the ms3d ascii format and write my own) is it practical to just compile different dts shapes for each sequence and load them with a script in game?

I mean, how do you guys do it? Surely I'm not the only person using milkshape and having this problem. Often when I come across a problem like this, there's a blatently obvious solution staring me in the face but at the moment, I really can't see it.

or is it simply that people give up with milkshape when it comes to animation and use 3D Studio instead and create a bunch of dsq files?

#7 @kuhles: trueSpace and gameSpace are pretty much the same animal, give or take a few buttons. The exporters will work with both(I use trueSpace myself).

@James: trueSpace doesn't natively export to DTS, though there's several exporters available. At this time, I don't see any doing DSQ format, but technically speaking, you don't have to to get multiple animations, because they can be embedded in the DTS files as well. I'm sure that before long we'll see DSQ export as well.

As for .map export, there's the exporter coming with gameSpace soon, and my own that I'm close to finishin(which will be backwards compatible with other tS versions, as the one that comes with gameSpace will not be).

BTW, I'm also embedding .mis export functionality into my worldScape terrain generation plugin(hell, if you're going to create the terrain in trueSpace, may as well get the whole mission skeleton going, right? Right...).

#8 Jason,

DSQ files are not that hard to make(they are just the sequence data for 1 or more sequences dumped to a file). It is entirely possible to modify the milkshape exporter so that it exports them.
The only exporters i know of that support them as of yet are the 3dsmax, lightwave and blender exporters.

#9 If anyone has a milkshape exporter which does this, I'd appreciate it.

If not, it seems like I'm going to have to write a MS3 txt animation concatinaiton program..

Unless blender can import ms3d files?

#10 Reading some of the posts on the Torque forum about DSQ's and Milkshape, it appears that Milkshape Normalises its bones, which would explain a couple of things, like why my turret messes up, goes all sideways even when I use the skeleton provided by the turrets example and why a DSQ exporter hasn't been written yet. Whereas some many others have.

So it seems that a DSQ exporter would be impossible to write without the ability to turn off this normalisation feature in Milkshape.

It appears that I'm going to have to write a MS3d Ascii animation splicer.

Just out of curiosity, how many people would find this useful?
An application which imports several milkshape files, combines them and spits out a file containing all of the animations including the materials the materials needed to let Torque know that there are many animations in the DTS file once it's exported from Milkshape.

I don't mind writing it if it will be useful, It'll be a VB app though.

But this would only be a workaround to the current problem.
The ideal solution would appear for the Author of Milkshape to make a small (maybe large) change to prevent the bones from being normalised. It'd fix my turret too I'd bet.