Puppetshop, the rigging and animation toolkit from Kees Rijnen, is now available for free!!!
Aaaaand … ShaderFX is free for …
[…] individuals and companies smaller than 2 employees
:woot:
Wow ! Pretty cool !
[It's at the bottom of the page, where it says: download.]
In addition to that, as result of the Softimage acquisition by Autodesk, CAT, another rigging, muscle and animation toolkit, is now available as extension download for 3ds max subscription customers. Here is an old review of the 'Character Animation Toolkit'
I never had a look at these animation packages… what about you?
Our animator has been using CAT for almost a year and he is so happy to have a real rigging tool, a useable animation layers system,… Biped was a pain to animate correctly. The problem of CAT is that it is coming from XSI which have diffrent coords system than 3dsmax. This leads to frequent gimbal locks in animation work… We are using a workaround about this and we finally are able to animate characters in an efficient way, I mean without this @#{~*$% Biped ! :). About ShaderFX, I didn't get into this one but it is an amazing tool. Obviously the "even 3Dartist will be able to make shaders" is not exact. You have to have some shader programmation skills for most of shaders.