I have submitted multiple crash reports in the last day using CAT. And now I have finally formalized how I feel about CAT. I will explain that feeling with a short story.

You’ve just met the most amazing woman in the universe--CATherine. She’s beautiful. I mean, drop-dead gorgeous. She loves sports. She teaches advanced theoretical geometry at some Ivy-league school. She enjoys a good drink. AND… she wants to come back to your place finally!!!!

So you bring her back. You are pretty happy, since you can see where things are going! You’re just about to make your move when she puts her hand up.

“No, no… we can’t do this!”

Stammering, heart pounding, you say, “Wha??”

She heaves a sigh and says, “You can’t touch me.” She looks disappointed, so you don’t understand.

She says, “Maybe I should go home. I’ll jump online so you can see me in video...”

She turns to walk away… You see your chance slipping away… so you reach out and grab her, spinning her around to you.

Immediately, a geiser of acidic vomit sand-blasts your face and knocks you to the ground. It takes you a moment to come to. You stand up in shock. You reach for her again, and immediately you are blasted with another wave of repulsion. This time you’ve slipped on something gastric and fallen into some piece of expensive houseware.

She looks sad. And you look around at all the devastation.

She wipes her mouth and cries, “I knew this would happen. It happens every time someone wants to touch me.” She bursts into tears and out of your home.

Shaking your head, you look around your place. You are amazed at how hard you have worked to get to this point. You giggle to yourself. This really isn’t funny… but you are laughing nonetheless.

You go grab a mop and wonder if maybe you should call her… maybe you can try again and things will be different…

Please fix her! Many of us want to be able to use CAT. But it is broken!

______________________________
Shawn Olson’s Creative Arts
Developer of the Wall Worm Model Tools for Source
And my Favorite Unsung Plugin: Convexity for Level Design

Max 4/Gmax, 2008 - 2013
Mudbox 2009-2011
Win 7 x64 (x4)
Geforce 480x2 | Geforce 275x1 | ATI Radeon HD 3200 | Intel Generic chip
8GB | 12GB | 4GB | 4GB
Intel Quad 6700 | i7 930 | Athlon QL-65 | Intel Quad 6700

I think I know what you mean, I had a similar experience about a year ago, and thought I’m not going there again. But I did start thinking about trying CAT again, perhaps my memory of how bad it was has faded with time, or it was remembering how good I hoped it would be.
It was actually triggered by events similar to last year when I was given a character-heavy job to do that needed to be done by Xmas. If CAT worked it would be the ideal tool for this, but this time I opted for the clunky old but more dependable Biped.
I think at some point I may give CAT another go in Max 32bit without plugins, but it will have to be on a more casual basis, not a production job with a deadline, but at a time when I’m not too busy. Only that is like last time, CAT never seemed that bad while just playing around, It’s when you get stuck into a heavy, complex, production job that you really see the ugly side, by which time it’s too late to turn back and try something else.

Ahh I feel your pain. Love hate relationship with CAT. I look at this way she is a great looking lady with issues. I am sure you all know what I mean by that. :)

I gave up on CAT soon after I tried it early last year. I went back to it today, after modeling a character this week, and with CAT it was so easy to set up the skeleton rig (except don’t try to move the clavicle, or you’ll never see it again! Or the rest of the arm for that matter). My character was skinned without any fuss. I tweaked all the settings to get the walkcycle to look nice. It is now time to animate my character in a small test scene to try out CAT.

I have moved the character to the corner of a simple room, and I created a path for her to follow as she walks across the room. Every time I open the motion editor to set the path for the object to follow, the motion editor freezes. I have restarted Max so many times, but the result is always the same. Max just stares back at me, it won’t move a millimetre. It is useless. So utterly useless. I could open the motion editor fine before when I was tweaking my walkcycle, now it just freezes.

Like in Shawn’s story above, CAT looks nice, seems to work nicely, until you want to start the action. Then it quits. It’s really disappointing. It’s disappointing that I have wasted some time and disappointing that now I have to spend a couple of days creating a new custom rig. Oh if only CAT worked, oh if only! Will my Asian lass ever get out of the corner? Maybe never with CAT. I suppose I can finish the hair and textures while I procrastinate over starting to make a custom rig, which I will also have to skin again, or I can try....32 bit (ouch). I think the worried look on her face says it all. (For some reason my jpg won’t attach to my post, and I am not pressing the preview button).

3ds Max 2013, Windows 7 pro 64bit.
MSI NVidia GeForce GT240, 1GB DDR3 (Driver 286.19).
i7 2.93Ghz , 16Gb CORSAIR Vengeance RAM, DX9.0c.

funny story -.-

i havnt got problems with rig becouse i used a standart human :\
but i get the “ctr+s” tick after working with curve editor…

Hi guys,
I can relate to some of your experiences with CAT. However, I have to mention that just like with women it is down to how you handel her needs.

I work for a small independent game developer and we have used CAT for all our characters. Appart from some minor inconveniences she was a god send, enabling me to rig and produce animation quickly which was essential to our project due to money and time constraints. CS would have done the job just as well, but we went for CAT due to it’s procedual walk cycle generation.

The layered work flow is fantastic and more intuitive than CS. However, my biggest issue with CAT is the aweful foot pivot system, it is a pain and makes simple tasks such as creating a keyframed walk cycle frustrating which frankly is absurd!!!

Maybe, a lot of the problems people encounter are related to the different needs of film production. However, from my experience, CAT works great as long as your not trying to get too fancy with the rig. So if your going for a cartoon character with lost of squash and stretch etc. CAT probably isn t the best choice (not yet anyways)because it is high maintence and touchy in terms of customisation. Having said that i have seen some insain rigs created with CAT, so I guess if you know your way around sky is the limit.

When CAT is used as an animation content creation tool for short sequences it is superb. Like any tool it has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Give it some time to get out of moody adolescent! The concepts behind it are inspirational.

For people new to 3d animation it can be a great starting point due to it’s small overhead and shallow learning curve. However, I’d say don’t expect it to perform miricals and learn custom rigging techniques at some point since nothing beats a taylor made rig and the prinziples help you understand how tools like CAT and CS work which is helpful once you run into problems or need to customise your rig.

It’s simply riddled with BUGS, no question about it.
The list is extensive, and that one is not even complete, there are more.
They are working on it though, which is great news. I do hope they get it right, if it worked I would use it.

I am working on a personal project using CAT, and have been for nearly 2 months. It’s at a standstill as of right now, I can’t proceed. I need to do a simple thing, have CAT recreate the footsteps in a short walk. If I could open the CATMotion editor without it hanging, I could do that.

I can’t open the file in 32bit anymore to do the edit, I need more than 3gb RAM for my scene. If I try to do the walk in a separate file, and import it to replace the existing animation, Max just crashes.

Before I came here just now, my wife said “Just start working on your next character, bashing the keyboard won’t do anything”.

I’ll wait for the service pack. At times, working with CAT is a true joy. I hope everything works as it should after the fix, the CATMotion editor hanging thing isn’t on the service pack list.

3ds Max 2013, Windows 7 pro 64bit.
MSI NVidia GeForce GT240, 1GB DDR3 (Driver 286.19).
i7 2.93Ghz , 16Gb CORSAIR Vengeance RAM, DX9.0c.

the CATMotion editor hanging thing isn’t on the service pack list.

I noticed that too. For me it’s the number one annoying bug with CAT, though I have avoided it by using Max 32bit for setting up Cat Motion. I did mention it in comments in the SP blog.

I can’t open the file in 32bit anymore to do the edit, I need more than 3gb RAM for my scene. If I try to do the walk in a separate file, and import it to replace the existing animation, Max just crashes.

The workaround I one used while in the middle of a project with CAT trouble was to save the character’s rig to file. Then open the rig in an empty scene, work on the animation, then save the animation clip. Then I loaded the main scene and loaded the anim clip onto the character in that scene.

Samab 26 May 2011 09:07 AM

The workaround I one used while in the middle of a project with CAT trouble was to save the character’s rig to file. Then open the rig in an empty scene, work on the animation, then save the animation clip. Then I loaded the main scene and loaded the anim clip onto the character in that scene.

I would love that to work. I’ll try making an animation clip again today. The last time I tried it Max just crashed when trying to load it. I can’t update my character rig without crashing Max either. I tweaked my character’s walkcycle in a separate file, and saved it as a preset. Whenever I try to update the character rig by loading the new character rig, I get an instant crash. I hope in the updated version I can update my character as easily as I’m supposed to be able to do, for now my character is stuck with a slightly clunky walk.

3ds Max 2013, Windows 7 pro 64bit.
MSI NVidia GeForce GT240, 1GB DDR3 (Driver 286.19).
i7 2.93Ghz , 16Gb CORSAIR Vengeance RAM, DX9.0c.

Honestly. I don’t know why we put up with this.

I am new to CAT. Was really trying NOT to use it but I have to animate cows.

I went through the tuts. Understood it all. Sweet. As I went through them my memory of the posts in this forum faded.. I got anxious. I rigged my cow in an hour and was animating away. Ok fine. This is easy. hmm.. the neck of the horse I used for the cow wasn’t quite right but I adapted and finished a simple animation in a fresh file. 

Then. It came time to import the cow animation I had done to a main animation file that included nothing more than one 3D tree, a flat plane and about 30 single poly background tree planes. Oh yeah. There’s a UFO in there as well. Not very complex.

After importing and positioning my cow I started seeing huge increases in the RAM usage. Max2011 starts out at 1.19 GB so I really don’t have much room. Per Samab’s advice I was working in Max2011-32. So the very top of RAM is 3G.

Then.. crash crash crash.. and bingo.. my file is gone. Go to the autoback. And waddya know! Object layers were gone, but the objects were still there. Though frozen. And I could not find them anywhere in MAx’s object list. Couldn’t find em.. couldn’t select them .. phantoms all of them.

Like following a rainbow to a pot of gold and getting robbed when you get there.