What's the best program for rigging?

[Springheel]

I'd like to start learning the skills/software necessary to rig models and apply animations to them. I just wanted to get some feedback on what program people think is the best for that? I know Ascottk used Maya, and has some good tutorials on the wiki, so I'm leaning towards that, but if anyone knows of a better option, I'm all ears.

 

(also, if anyone knows where I could...ahem, get a copy of Maya or a hypothetical better program, PM me).

[squill]

i would also recommend maya, but i can of course only talk from my own experience with rigging. I've also done some rigging and lot's of animation in 3ds Max but compared to Maya, maya is much easier for me in setting up joints, create controls and finally animate.

 

But i may be a bit biased cause i use Maya on a daily base at work. For some it can also have a steep learning curve before you finally understand the tools and build an actual rig but it pays off in the end.

[Springheel]

Ok, so I need to track down a version of Maya then.

[oDDity]

You don't need to build a rig in maya, use motionbuilder and that'll happen automatically, or there are auto rigger for maya as well. You don't even need to build a skeleton, since there are already templates from the other characters you can drop in.

All you need to learning is skinning, and that's easy in any app, it's quite boring though.

What do you mean by 'learn to apply animations' though?

[Springheel]

What do you mean by 'learn to apply animations' though?

 

I'm not sure of the proper term...it might be 'exporting'. Basically the job that Ascottk used to do for us...take the animations made by the animators and then create a md5anim file for a particular AI.

 

Btw, is the free version of Maya (the 'learning edition') of any use or do I need to get a full version?

[Domarius]

Yeah exporting.

I can tell you everything about rigging in 3DS Max I think oDDity will be able to tell you everything you need to know though, for our mod.

[squill]

Btw, is the free version of Maya (the 'learning edition') of any use or do I need to get a full version?

 

probably the full, also the learning edition won't be of any use because the last export plugin for Maya only supported 7.0 But we still use that version for exporting.