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Character Studio http://www4.discreet.com/3dsmax/3dsmax.php?id=985

Animanium http://www.animanium.com/product_operational.htm

CAT http://www.catoolkit.com/support/videos.asp

MotionBuilder http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services/motionbuilder/index.shtml

endorphin http://www.naturalmotion.com

Project Messiah http://www.projectmessiah.com/x2/videos.htm


Rigging

  • Full Auto
    • None of the tools I've found would I consider 'true' autorigging, ie automatic joint creation and placement based on mesh structure. I did find a paper that 'sortof' accomplishes this, but appears it only finds the locations of terminal or juncture joints, and joints that have the mesh adequately bent at the joint.
    • Automatic Bone Generation For Character Animation Using the Discrete Medial Axis Transformation https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/informatik/HomePages/GDV/forschung/doc/mi_prof_publik_154.pdf
    • It is also unclear from the paper if the placement is sufficiently good for animation.
    • Of course there are also meshes that are prerigged, and then the user just edits the mesh itself (ie Poser or Makehuman).
  • Manual
    • What most programs actually mean by autorigging, is that they either have prebuit rigs for various character types (ie bipeds, dogleg bipeds, quadrupeds, spiders, birds). Or they have procedural methods for building a rig where certain body parts are predefined and then you choose how many of each part is used and where they are located. Then the user is expected to scale the rig to the proper size and drag the joints to the proper locations. A third meaning of autorigging is that the user creates the skeleton, and then the constraints are automatically applied.
  • Constraints
    • I really liked the lightwave method of setting up basic angle constraints. Clicking on a joint revealed a list of three values, one could be selected then you could CTRL click and drag to set the maximum rotation angle.
    • See the IKB_001.mov from above.
    • Other useful constraints were floor constraints, the best floor constraints caused the foot to rotate and flatten when it made contact with the floor or rotate and slide, as handled in motionbuilder.
    • http://aliaswavefront.topdownloads.com/pub/bws/bws_79/gmk_motionbuilder6_character_animation_basics.swf
    • It occurred to that there should be a number of options on what to do when a colission occurs. For instance the hand closing/wrapping around an object. Or the fingertips sliding along a surface. Lightwave has an option for doing softbody stuff (such as the squish and bulge of a tire),In Endorphin, you can constrain a joint to stay on a line, a surface, or within a volume. Also Endorphin can switch to an animation or AI behavior, based on a collission.
    • http://www.naturalmotion.com/files/endorphin_intro3.mov
  • Manipulation
    • Selection Follows mouse - having the selection follow the mouse is much faster than having to click on each bone. This option was available in most of the packages, and Animanium has it on by default. Something that I didn't see, but would be really useful is enable it for multiple characters at the same time, which would greatly speed up doing scenes where characters are reacting to each other in rapid succession (for instance a fight). It would also be nice to have one click constraining and releasing (to make it easy to for instance, to have one character grab a character and then have their arm pulled around.)
    • Animanium has a very fast method of locking and releasing constraints on position and location. Especially nice are the ability to set up locking groups that can be rapidly turned on and off. - http://www.animanium.com/movies/AnimaniDemo_QT/AnimaniDemo3.mov http://www.animanium.com/movies/AnimaniDemo_QT/AnimaniDemo4.mov
    • Every package seems to have a wide variety of default handles that convey what the handle does. The are generally configurable for color, shape, and label.
    • Autoswitch IK/FK mode - many of the packages are 'smart' about IK and FK. Automatically turning on FK when appropriate. Animaniums isn't automagic, but it does have an excellent FK implementation. http://www.animanium.com/movies/AnimaniDemo_QT/AnimaniDemo2.mov
    • Proxys - most of the packages allow you to use proxys for selection and manipulation.

(not completed...) Mechanisms 

      IK/FK blending
      linkage to rotation angle
              (displacement map, morph target, deformation curve, etc.)
      Blending from multiple sources
              (bvh, previous animations)
              whole body
              partial body
              from a different body part
      Copy and Paste Animation and Poses
              From opposite side body part
              From a different animation
              From a different armature
      Collision based mechanisms
              collide and slide
              collide and wrap/rotate
              collide and stop
      Sketch based
              sketch curves for facial animation
              sketch body poses
              sketch propogate up the ik chain! (or just n/p)
      Physics and Dynamics based
      Skin spread/squish on collission
      Rotoscoping based (video in a background clip on a plane)
      Procedural
              speech and emotion based
                      (neural network based...)
              walk cycle tools
              generated from noise
      Record mouse movement
      Dynamic Weighting (Ie the melt tool...)
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