I am presently using Maya for character & camera animation.Using the Trax and Graph editor is really cool.Especially the Trax editor,as it makes animation easier but the problem is, it takes time to get the animation right especially with keyframing,not to mention rigging the character first before animating.

Then I heard about poser.I gather its easier to use and u can animate cameras and characters faster and easier.I have watched the DEAD FANTASY series and I understand Maya was used for the modelling while Poser for animating.It seems with Poser u don’t need to worry about the whole rigging routine in Maya and animation is less technical and easier to manage.Can one import models into Poser and animate straight away or u need to rig like maya or is the rigging way simpler.I have seen some tutorials on youtube and I like what I am seeing.

About motion builder,I don’t really know much about it.But someone told me its used mostly for motion capture.I understand it was used for the overawesome movie:AVATAR.
Your opinions really matter here.I would like to know what u all think.I use Maya as my primary software,so I am wondering if its possible,after animating in Poser or MotionBuilder,can the animation be exported back to maya along with the models as a file format?A fbx file peharps?

Thanks.

I had to animate a project once in Poser after years of animating in Maya...and I found it really awful.
This is just my opinion...but I would not recommend using Poser as your primary animation tool.

You need to rig a character specifically for Poser and cannot import and animate that rig in Maya directly.
There is a plug-in with Poser Professional that alows you basically open you Poser animation in Maya for rendering or whatnot but it was far from seamless for me. Couting on Poser and Maya to play nicely is not something I would build a pipeline on with the current state of things.

I don’t have experience with Motion Builder, but I know it is not just a motion capture tool.
It is a full fleged animation program, and while you do need to rig characters with Motion Builder integration in mind...the integration is far more dynamic between software packages.

Again, these are just my opinions here...I sure one of many you are about to recieve.
~Ben

U do have a point.So what do u use for ur animations? I also noticed that most game and animation companies don’t ask for animators that use POSER rather Maya,3DMax or motion builder.Is POSER really that bad?
I saw this tutorial on POSER:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVHjTVDi3Uc
It looks easy.

Check out this animation video,it may not be animation’s best but u know u can lipsynch,move ur characters about at the same time and I don’t think animation curves matter here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcKUz8i9n4g&feature=channel
This was done with DAZ Studio which is similar to POSER:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxf8dpY65Mw&feature=related

Maybe I should get motion builder.Is the learning curve in motionbuilder hard?

while it is true for AVATAR to do it’s motion capture in motionBuilder. it is also true that motionbuilder is great for motion capture but it is also a great character animation piece of software.

I would say, you might not have to worry so much about rigging in motionBuilder as all you really need to do is to setup the joints in maya and skinning it in maya. Export those in FBX.
Bring it into motionBuilder, drag and drop the Charaterize Tool to setup it animation controls. and you’re good to go.

You also mentioned you like the way animation works in Trax, I’m tell’in you, you’ll we Addicted to motionBuilder.

As for myself, I’m still happy with the way I hand -animate in maya. knot by knot:)

just me and my 2 cents,

I have been considering focusing on animating with the timeslider and Graph editor only.Kinda figured the trax editor kinda limits creativity and makes one lazy.One tends to reuse clips thus making movements look repititive instead of coming up with new movements.I will try animating with keyframing rather than clips.
Seems u prefer animating frame by frame in Maya.Will definitely take longer though.Wonder if motionbuilder has walk cycle presets that one can edit or finetune.