hmmmm....

I am currently getting my feet wet with Character Animation (CA) in 3DSMax.

In that program, you have the fully powerful MaxBones approach, which I would imagine is the path that contains the idea of bones/joints/rig for the face.

However, you also have BiPed (Character Studio). It's a much simpler control rig. I purchased a fully rigged BiPed character from Turbo Squid and satisfied myself that I could achieve a wonderful and powerful workflow for moving the character around and applying translation/rotation in a very simple way. As a matter of fact, I am in love with it; it surpasses anything else I've tried for direct manipulation of human model such as Poser, D|S or Carrara, and trials I took in other software, as well.

What about facial animation and expression plus lip sync? With BiPed it is not about bones. It is about mesh deformation thru morph modifiers. Within Max itself there are good tools for this, but I have not penetrated them too much yet, because this plugin is has called me with emphasis:

LipService with LBrush by Joe Alter
http://lbrusn.com

Joe is the creator of "Shave and a Haircut" the stand-alone hair/fur system, which is now integreated into and included with 3DSMax.

LBrush combines subdivision, sculpting, painting and morph creation. You put these tools right at the heart of your CA workflow. It's like having a purpose-built ZBrush right there, right at the place you need it, to scuplt and paint the face as needed and when needed.

It feels to me like the LBrush work flow is the grown-up version of the way I work in Poser: use the shaping dials to get as close as you can to the look you want, then activate the MorphBrushTool to create one or more custom 'shapings' that become dials. Then, animate the expresion and viseme morphs.

To me, this is the intuitive way to go. Certainly I would and should like to know more about the bones/rig approach.

By the way, in my trial of Modo I saw that while Modo does not yet have rigging/translation of rig it does have this subdivide/sculpt/paint/manipulate workflow already up and functioning. There is a fantastic demo video for it, don't have time this morning to find the link. When Modo gets full CA plus hair/cloth, you combine it with their brush/sculpt engine and the powerful render engine....Modo could become seriously serious.

::::: Opera :::::