Animators - software for under a tenner

[sirhenry]

Messiah Studio are doing some weird campaign, selling Messiah (usually retailing at $500ish) for $10 for a brief period.
So if you're looking for professional software that's affordable without torrenting and cracking, you've probably got about 6 hours before the offer runs out.

Neil - this isn't spam, it's an attempt to get more and better animation on (spam).

Edit: a link would probably help...

[Still Not George]

Definitely interesting.

Quick thing I should probably point out - this is a "Dare To Share" offer. What that means is that the software won't be delivered at the cut price unless x number of people buy it. Which means it's a promotion - which doesn't mean I'm not going to buy it anyway... my animator will be rather happy, I suspect.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Sounds interesting certainly. Does anyone know how it compares to Maya?

[Still Not George]

Sounds interesting certainly. Does anyone know how it compares to Maya?

From what I can tell it's not really meant as a replacement for Maya - it's a standalone character rigger/animator that exports to FBX, meaning you can then import the results straight into Maya. Although there's some info on integration, too.

[sirhenry]

From what I can tell it's not really meant as a replacement for Maya - it's a standalone character rigger/animator that exports to FBX, meaning you can then import the results straight into Maya. Although there's some info on integration, too.

Or vice versa, as far as I can see.

[Still Not George]

Yeah, but there's not a great deal of point exporting from Maya into a standalone rigger. No matter how good it is, the renderer isn't likely to be up to scratch - the renderng tools are really to help out people that don't have a mainline package like Maya or Max. Apparently the whole thing started out as a Lightwave character rigging plugin.

OTOH it exports to FBX, which practically everything in existence can import (except XNA, because XNA is a heap of shit). That makes it kind of awesome for game development, as I can do a quick conversion and drop it straight into PhyreEngine or min3d or whatever I'm using. Won't help much with bigger projects, cos it doesn't seem to have Havok or PhysX integration so it won't work for physics purposes - we'd still have to take it through Max or Maya.