More About The 3DsMax CAT feature and its effectiveness.

CAT Rigs

CAT Rigs

Hello HypefroActive fans and welcome to another stunning edition of HypefroActive Animation talk. Now as you know, our blog posts are centered around animations and the software of choice is 3Dsmax. Again, i've at a time not too long ago talked about The 3DsMax Cat Rig. A very powerful tool in its own right that can achieve almost same level of animations as The 3DsMax custom bone Rig would. I use the word almost because the custom bone rig can be very flexible in design and creativity. Using the custom bones to rig a body, the body could be driven by three controls, two of which controls the upper and lower body while the third is an independent control, situated where the hip control is and controls both. That is to say, it parents both body controls and the other two are its children and are driven by whatever action that is passed on to this third control, and can drive the bones linked to them individually as well. Further more, if this setup is built with a spline ik system, then you really get to see how flexible, this kind of rig is. But in the case of the CAT, the setup is a lot more simplified and set to major defaults but can accommodate small changes. Though you could try to set up the body to be controlled with three shapes like the custom bone as described above and set up a sort of look at constraints to make the shoulders point at minor shifts to the body, it still is not as flexible as the custom bones.

Cat In setup Mode

But if you are looking at very quick and powerful animation using 3dsmax software, then the CAT might just be your best bet to achieving this. The CAT studio not only sets up a rig for you to animate with quickly, it also stores animations of all sorts done to a character just like the biped. It stores poses as well and you can recall a whole animation back for re-use. And i mean an entire animation. The best of it is that these animations are transferable to other CAT rigs and can be used anytime within the current project or in another project entirely as long as the animation in question is saved in the CAT animation studio, which other People like to call The CAT layer Manager.


Another good thing about it is that, Animations in CAT are done in layers. Yes just like in photoshop layers and its totality is evaluated from top to bottom. At this point, confusion can set in and i understand why and how. Top to bottom here means, the top layer is evaluated first, then the next and in that order until it gets to the bottom layer. The tricky part and what kept me here learning how to use the CAT feature longer than i should have is that i didn't understand how the layers actually interact. So here it is. Lets say we have four layers on top of each other labelled 1-4 from top to bottom and in animation mode. Layer 1 becomes active when added in the stack and is operational. when 2 is added, it over shadows layer 1, thus 2

CAT in Animation mode and different layers.

becomes operational all through. That means though layer 1 is still present, it no longer is active because it has been over shadowed by 2. and even if no animation is on 2, Layer 1 still wont be active. Think of it as Layer 2 is the current layer CAT recognizes at this point and ready to work with. To make layer 1 active, you have to sort of blend layer 1 and layer 2 together. Meaning you'll tell CAT that from say frame 0-500, layer 1 should be active and from frame 501-1500 or so, layer 2 should take over. Now if you had the whole 4 layers present, the idea is the same.

You can watch or download "how to use 3DSMax CAT video" from the net but i strongly suggest that if you want to really go far with learning CAT, maybe you should consider visiting Autodesk 3DsMax learning channels. In there they'll take you through on how to use the CAT feature sequentially. Again just for the record this was done using the CAT Rig  http://reidchannel.blogspot.com/2014/06/making-of-brazil2014-super-eagles-of.html

And after finishing the Animation, this was the result http://youtu.be/Z-vY3sZ5hlM

So, you see that the CAT feature of 3Dsmax is powerful indeed and can create an animation movie from start to finish plus it works well with mocap data. Matter of fact, I plan doing my future quick animations using the 3dsmax CAT. Tweakings to animations can be done on separate Layers like the local or world adjustment layers to suit your purpose. It also comes with a default walk and run preset and maybe more. And it is suitable as well for crowd animation. So in conclusion, if you are thinking quick and very good animation, whose rig could be set up in about ten to twenty minutes then The CAT is an ideal animation tool.