Panther Walking - CAT

[dejaVu]

Just playing with a very cool character animation plugin called "CAT (character Animation Toolkit - www.catoolkit.com)

and rendered with VRay of course.

Am in the process of writing an intro tutorial for CAT based on this scene.
Will post when it's ready.
Comments welcomed.



The movie can be downloaded here (1.47Mb):
http://www.osmosis.com.au/review/pantherwalk.avi

[TJE]

Wow, spot on movement, I must say! Did you animate this by hand?
Good one!

[Merch]

Great movie. really made me laugh. Did notice the panthers claws passing through the plane on a few occassions.

I look forward to tutorial!

Merch

[shytigercp]

RE

Great movement...the only thing I noticed was the dragging of the knuckles on the front paws.

[Syclone1]

Re: RE

Great movement...the only thing I noticed was the dragging of the knuckles on the front paws.

Maby he was out parting all night

-dave

[themaxxer]

...it walks like cat, but it pisses like a dog!



great animation!

best regards
themaxxer

[dejaVu]

Thanks for your comments.

TJE, Merch & shytigercp :
The animation is a mix of procedural (CATMotion) walkcycle, Relative keys, and Keyframes.
CATMotion is great for cyclic motion like walks and runs, etc. I noticed the feet going throught the ground plane too, but left it in there so that I can fix it to show how quickly it can be done. I just went back to CATMotion and adjusted a couple of parameters that affect the curling of the toes as well as the amount of lift of the feet, and it's all fixed.

Relative keys can be placed on top of already existing animation, in this case the walk cycle, to add to the animation. A Relative layer was added to turn the head to look at the letters as the CAT walks along a CATMotion path.

Will update movie with fixes when it's done rendering.

The surprise ending was created with an Absolute layer, or freehand keyframes, and then blended back to CATMotion again.

CAT is really flexible, powerful and easy to use. That animation was done in just over an hour from scratch. The majority of the time was probably spent on thinking about what to animate.

[v_wrangler]

Hello Vu,

Looking forward to that tutorial. Were also looking into into CAT, CS
and a bunch of other character anim plugins. I'm really impressed with
CAT but the complexity seems so steep. You make it really look very
easy And at the current price - at 10 seats we'd be very poor!

How well does it integrate in a VRAY workflow? - I assume there are no
problems but I just want to hear your own experiences..

Regards,

[dejaVu]

Hi Roy,
It'll be a little while before I get time to write the tutorial and capture images...writing tuts takes too long. Perhaps I'll do a video tut instead.

In the meantime, here are some answers:
1. We demoed all the Character Animation plugs for 3ds max recently too for a project. We even bought a seat of CS, but when CAT was released, it blew us away. We didn't even hesitate to switch over to CAT even though that meant the brand new CS CD became a very expensive paperweight.

2. CAT is really simple to use, and very intuitive. It allows you to create Rigs with unlimited arms and legs, whereas CS and HumanIK are quite limited in this regard. If you're new to it, there are a variety of Preset Rigs that ship straight out of the box and you can share rigs or download for free more from their website.
If you have tried CS, CAT will be a walk in the park. The CATMotion system is priceless, and keyframe animation is real fast and responsive.

3. As for the price, it's not cheap but it's great value for money for what you get and compared to it's competitors. The bonus here is that you can download a trial version of CAT to see if it suits you. There are a few video tuts on their site that you can download and watch. They're very good.

We haven't come across any workflow issues with VRay. It's just a rigging system so I wouldn't imagine that there would be any clashes there.
I also have to mention that the support is excellent. They work on the same premise as the VRay guys. Small company but real fast response time.

Hope this helps you decide Roy.
This all makes me sound like a CAT fan, but that's probably because I am.

A couple of recent reviews:
http://www.rendernode.com/articles.php?articleId=151

http://www.animationmagazine.net/art...rticle_id=2519

regards,
Vu

[trixian]

How does it compare to say, puppet shop? (It's stil in beta, but there should be some good features present to compare). Did you guys try it out before getting cat?

[dejaVu]

Puppetshop looks very similar to CAT (perhaps a little too similar), and for good reason.
I believe Kees (author of Puppetshop) was on the early beta program and obviously liked what he saw.

Puppetshop is still in it's early stages, and besides the videos and screen grabs I can't say I've had a good look at it. On the otherhand, CAT has been in development for a couple of years now and is a much more mature and complete product. The downside to that is that it's not free, but I believe it's a pretty good investment if you are into Character animation.

[jacksc02]

Vu- Just wanted to say thanks for the interesting talk at the AEAF conference in Melbourne. It was very interesting.

Love the CAT animation, I think the knuckle dragging is quite nice.

Would love to hear what issues you had with Vray in your Virtual room production.

Regards
Chris Jackson
cj@arcad.co.nz
www.arcad.co.nz

[dejaVu]

Thanks Chris.
Wasn't sure how it came across.

CAT is pretty cool.
Just updated the animation again with a bit where the CAT walks backwards...which is surprisingly easy to do.

Issues we had with VRay had to do with mattes, GI shadowing, lack of G-buffer support and being able to render out in passes, etc.
Hopefully these things will be fixed in 1.5.

Thanks again for your feedback.

[dejaVu]

OK, as promised, here is the first CAT tutorial for the Panther.
It briefly demonstrates how to create a CATRig and get it walking along a Spline.

As this is the first of many, I would appreciate your comments on whether it is too short, long, boring, small, etc.

As with any web-delivered material bandwidth is always an issue, so there are many tips, features and icons that I would like to cover, but can't so need to strike a balance.

All comments and suggestions appreciated.

http://www.osmosis.com.au/info/tutor...nther_CM1.html

[agentdark45]

Great tutorial! Much appreciated! - No crits - very easy to understand and follow!