Tags
3DS Max, CAT Rig, character, Character Design, concept, Design, Dropbox, Maxwell Render, Mental Ray, Perforce, Pre Production, Silhouettes, VRay
I think it’s time we narrowed down the mediums we’ll be using to create this short. The more I think about it, the more I believe we should use 3D Studio Max’s CAT Rig for Eve. It’s incredibly versatile, simple, and effective. It’s the rig we use at The Amazing Society for our acrobatic, high-flying characters in Super Hero Squad Online. And there’s a million (give or take) resources out there for troubleshooting and guidelines.
Image from Autodesk's help files
For rendering – I really don’t have a strong opinion yet. Especially since we aren’t sure as to what the “finish” is going to be. If we go with something super painterly, it may not matter at all. A few contenders:
Mental Ray
(Trusty, Simple, Comes with Max)
- Image from i3D Tutorials
VRay (Maybe even VRay 2.0?)
(A little more versatile, Tons of resources)
Image from VRay
Maxwell Render
(Very powerful, Fast, Separate User Interface)
Image from Maxwell Render
(Check the click-through link for an amazingly extensive gallery of gorgeous renders – and videos!)
For asset management and sharing, I was thinking we could use Dropbox. But that might only be good enough for asset storage. We could look into something like Perforce for sharing assets if problems arise. I suppose it all depends on our pipeline (more on this after our next meeting).
All this said, I’d like to take another step toward getting a rig for Romina to work with. I certainly don’t mean to stomp over the amazing work Jenki’s got planned – these are simply for the purposes of rig-construction. Once we have in mind the basic proportions, we can build a more finished design on top of the skeleton.
Ref Image from Siberia Photography
For this image, I took the body parts from the basic silhouettes and mixed them up to create composite silhouettes. Then gave them all a cutout treatment – for funsies.
How are we feeling this fine Sunday?
Another Chance 
The second to last silhouette in the Composite row looks like Starvin Marvin. #yuck
CAT rig sounds good to me! I feel like our biggest advantages with Maya were the animation tools, but 3DS Max is just fine. I played around with a few different CAT rigs and I’ll try to do a few cycles and exercises to get comfortable before we get to the animation stage.
In terms of renderers, I don’t feel knowledgeable enough to have a real opinion.. This is much more your expertise 🙂
Dropbox sounds good to me.. do you know if you can have more than one account running on a machine?
For the silhouettes, hmmm.. did we ever discuss her height? I kind of like a mix between the bell and waif silhouettes.. Maybe a little narrower in the hips for bell and slightly less towering for the waif. What do you think Jenki?