Hi, I’m working with CAT - max 2009 approximately 2 years. I really know what you mean by high-speed production, and CAT good enough. I tried a lot of animation system in max or maya, actually you can’t find any animation (also rigging) system faster than CAT, believe me. CAT works best in max 2009 now, even 2011 has lot of crashes. CAT has some simple individual problems with individual solutions like any other programs. There is no problem that I couldn’t find solution by now. You can take a look my works with CAT, http://cankiral.com/category/download If you have any trouble in CAT don’t hesitate ask me. I always said that; there is nothing that you can’t do with CAT. Be brave! :D

Thanks, cankiral. I like your CAT work very much. Nice flow. Do you have experience with multiple characters in the same scene? We have some shots with 6 speaking characters and many more peripheral characters.

I animated 12 character at the same scene today at the work. I struggled with villagers :) We are animating TV cartoon series named Keloglan here, and we use CAT. You can take a look at cartoon that I mentioned; http://cankiral.com/keloglan_showcase It’s really great plugin.

You need to know how to use it

I would question whether undertaking a new project with tight deadlines is the right time to be learning something new. In the long run CAT will probably win out as it it clearly a better system, but I would suggest that James would be better off, on this occasion, using Biped (which he knows and is stable) rather than risking CAT. Just IMO, of course.

This is my concern, Steve. Learning on the job is hard enough as it is, but if you’re learning something that has its own set of quirks, it makes it even harder.

But then the question becomes, when can you actually make the switch? I’m always either on a mission critical project, or just fooling around and I don’t have enough fooling around time to push things hard enough to see where they break. At some point I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and switch, but the more stable CAT is before I switch, the better I’ll feel.

Given your vast production experience with CAT, I was wondering if you could answer what may be a very simple workflow question for me:

I am building several characters, using the same basic mesh as their base.  They’re going to be different heights, and have different facial features, but will all require basically the same rig, just resized.  Is this the sort of operation CAT is useful for? 

And do you have any experience moving between Max with CAT and MotionBuilder and then back again?

Got it.  Thanks.

Nice tutorials, & cool demo; thanks.

Yes, Gräck’s tutorials are great. I am still patiently waiting for Gräck to create his in-depth CAT tutorial series, which I am willing to pay good money for. :)