"I've been eyeing Carrara and also Character Studio with 3dsMax as future avenues."

Just FYI, Operaguy... CharacterStudio uses falloff zones (envelopes) that are very similar to Poser's joints. The big difference is in the level of control. In CS, you can specify the degree of influence for each envelope right down to the vertex level, excluding or including individual vertices (or groups of vertices) as you see fit, in order to get the best possible bending. It also has other goodies, like "buldge" and "tendon" parameters, that make muscle deformations possible without the use of special morphs. It's a really easy and useful solution, but not quite as integrated as standard weight-mapped bone rigs. There are some pros and cons to using CharacterStudio in 3ds over standard bones, but for the most part I think it's a really good way to rig a character.

Now if Carrara 5 really can convert a Poser rig over to Carrara rig, then that's worth the price of admission right there. Depending on how good Carrara is at animating human characters.

Message edited on: 12/19/2005 11:16