best tools for animating
 

I'm wanting to get into animation, I don't know too much, so I'm wondering about some of the special plugins that are available for facial animation, and character pickers. What little I've done so far is very frustrating and I would like some feed back on tools I can use to make it easier.

If someone could let me know what they think works best for them, I would really appreciate it. I'm just a hobbyist so I don't have loads of money to spend on high dollar plugins.

:confused:

Gah - wish I could help you here, especially since you offer so much help to our other members, but animation has always eluded me as a skill. Were there any particular tools or plug-ins that you were looking at specifically to get advice on? I know that Messiah:Studio Workstation has a demo for download if that's of any help....

Well actually, for instance ; Timothy Albee has a facial animation plugin and Jonny Gorden has one that uses a joystick control type thing. I'm not interested in those auto rigging tools, I think I can handle that fairly easily.

There are also a couple of character picker tools that I'm quite interested in - I poste an e-mail to the editor of 3D World and he said to check in some of the forums to find out as they haven't done any comparisons.

Maybe the pros don't botherwith them, Me; I've found it hard to pick the controls, I plan on buying another monitor to give me some more space to help in that area, I am curious just what does everybody else do or use?

Thanx for the reply :p

There are lots of plugs and tools to help with animation in Lightwave.

Check out my Rigs page on my site for some links to handy plugs:
http://www.nemac4.com/Gen_Rigs

Monkey Jam is great for working out timing:
http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkey...jam/index.html

Thanks Dave for all those plugins, I'll have to play with them alot to see if they'll help!

right now I'm frustrated with v9.0, my hub isn't working and Techsupport doesn't seem to know why not. Of Course it screwd up my 8.5 install also :headbang:

I think I'll like that MonkeyJam thingy, it looks pretty good !

Thanks for sharing



:beer: