Request for simple 3D animation software
I've been looking for simpler 3D animation software, not animation in larger 3D packages like 3D max, maya, blender etc
Avoiding newer and bloated software.
I'm really mainly after something with a dope sheet and can export the model reliably in a format assimp converter can convert reliably, .x, .dea, .fbx etc. Would be nice if it has easy rigging (creating the skeleton bones) and skinning (assigning verts and weights to bones)
So far the best I've seen are:
https://www.flat2d.com/CharacterFX.html
Very simple program, easy to pick up and use straight away in a few hours of follow tutorials and playing around.
This just clicked with me and it was fun to use.
But it's from 2001 and crashes sometimes for me, somethings feel unfinished (scroll support), the exports are limited to .x and .b3d , it has scripting support for exports, so you can roll your own I guess.
Akeytsu is free and modern animation tool and more complex, but the basics are simple enough after a few hours with tuts and playing.
Rigging and skinning are mostly automated like Mixamo. Import is limited to FBX and DAE, export is only FBX and seems reliable.
So between the two, I think I can work out a 3D animation pipeline.
But there must be many more out there? any other suggestions?
I also don't mind paying for software.
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Tried and are a "maybe" to me so far.
Fragmotion, has a nice dope sheet and good export support but the interface IMO is very tedious, changing tools for select, move, bone.
I get that's the old way, but good (updated) 3D software should know when you click on empty space it's typically a camera movement and a click on a 3D primitive is a object movement or action menu etc.
Milkshape, uses a time line and doesn't have a dope sheet, and tedious like fragmotion.
https://flat2d.com/pacemaker.html
Doesn't have a dope sheet but looks interesting.
Unfortunately the mouse is unusable in VMWare, it's somehow related to the rendering and it gitters really bad.
So I didn't fully try it because of the gitter, I've tried different OS'es VMware winXP, win10 and win11, even wine in linux has the same issue.
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Some that I tried and wont try again.
Poser.
Poser UI and movement are stuck in the 90's but the most difficult part with Poser is having to skin everything twice, first into a set body group (for internal morphing or clothes etc, I guess?) and then to the bones with weights. It's also pretty complex.
Poser 11/gamedev edition has some benefits like
good dope sheet, walk editor, probably the best export support (better than fragmotion/milkshape!) I've seen and okay polygon reduction tool.
But I was fighting it too much to be useful to me.
Daz3D.
I didn't really use it that much, too complex and didn't click with me.
Misfit.
http://www.misfitcode.com/misfitmodel3d/features.html
maintained here:
https://github.com/clover-moe/mm3d/releases
No dope sheet and found animation system clunky, bolted on.
Avoiding newer and bloated software.
I'm really mainly after something with a dope sheet and can export the model reliably in a format assimp converter can convert reliably, .x, .dea, .fbx etc. Would be nice if it has easy rigging (creating the skeleton bones) and skinning (assigning verts and weights to bones)
So far the best I've seen are:
https://www.flat2d.com/CharacterFX.html
Very simple program, easy to pick up and use straight away in a few hours of follow tutorials and playing around.
This just clicked with me and it was fun to use.
But it's from 2001 and crashes sometimes for me, somethings feel unfinished (scroll support), the exports are limited to .x and .b3d , it has scripting support for exports, so you can roll your own I guess.
Akeytsu is free and modern animation tool and more complex, but the basics are simple enough after a few hours with tuts and playing.
Rigging and skinning are mostly automated like Mixamo. Import is limited to FBX and DAE, export is only FBX and seems reliable.
So between the two, I think I can work out a 3D animation pipeline.
But there must be many more out there? any other suggestions?
I also don't mind paying for software.
------------------------------------------------------
Tried and are a "maybe" to me so far.
Fragmotion, has a nice dope sheet and good export support but the interface IMO is very tedious, changing tools for select, move, bone.
I get that's the old way, but good (updated) 3D software should know when you click on empty space it's typically a camera movement and a click on a 3D primitive is a object movement or action menu etc.
Milkshape, uses a time line and doesn't have a dope sheet, and tedious like fragmotion.
https://flat2d.com/pacemaker.html
Doesn't have a dope sheet but looks interesting.
Unfortunately the mouse is unusable in VMWare, it's somehow related to the rendering and it gitters really bad.
So I didn't fully try it because of the gitter, I've tried different OS'es VMware winXP, win10 and win11, even wine in linux has the same issue.
------------------------------------------------------
Some that I tried and wont try again.
Poser.
Poser UI and movement are stuck in the 90's but the most difficult part with Poser is having to skin everything twice, first into a set body group (for internal morphing or clothes etc, I guess?) and then to the bones with weights. It's also pretty complex.
Poser 11/gamedev edition has some benefits like
good dope sheet, walk editor, probably the best export support (better than fragmotion/milkshape!) I've seen and okay polygon reduction tool.
But I was fighting it too much to be useful to me.
Daz3D.
I didn't really use it that much, too complex and didn't click with me.
Misfit.
http://www.misfitcode.com/misfitmodel3d/features.html
maintained here:
https://github.com/clover-moe/mm3d/releases
No dope sheet and found animation system clunky, bolted on.
Comments
Years ago it was hard to learn because it was overcomplicated and changed immensely over iterations making it hard to learn but in recent years it has become very well matured. You could be very proficient in it within a few weeks to a month.
3ds from this time is like a more polished milkshape 3d
There's one's you have not tried like Natural Motion Endorphin, Credo LifeForms Studio which also acts as a plugin way back in the day (Including Poser probably Poser 4), SEGA Animanium...
One of the BEST is HASH Animation Master but there's no gaming export I'm aware of... "What's done in HASH STAYS in HASH!" But people with grim machines were making kick-ass animations in the 90's with it... Mostly because the HASH Patch is like 50-60 ties as efficient as a polygon & there were other cool attributes like no need for UV mapping, the 'textures' (decals in HASH) simply 'stuck' & moved proper where they were placed... But you can't import a mesh into it without it being a mess the only thing I tried that worked was there was this guy who made a export plug for an old version of Wings3D which works actually quite well...
But who knows, maybe things changed about export, HASH is still around but a subscription now...
You can look at older movies-
ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/movies/
If you look at what was done in the 90's it was quite impressive for the time...
What about Caligari gameSpace?... Cinema4D is a 'mid-level' package & rather easy... Eovia/DAZ Carrara can hook runtimes, don't know on the export...
E-Frontier/Mirye Shade3D does same... Spitting ideas here...SPITTING!
There's Kaydara FilmBox/MotionBuilder...
For me the catch with blender is the ever changing UI, but really my issue is the size, it's great that it can do a lot, I'm no artist, so I'm not criticising when I say "bloat", but to me it's a big learning curve and I just don't have that type of commitment.
I bought the physical box of 3DS Max 6 a long time ago and I tried learning it with character (builder? studio?), it's huge!
Modo became free a few years ago and I spent some time with the manual and tuts and IMO it's a lot nicer than blender in many ways, but it's also big and I couldn't configure it to my liking (Japanese mouse style, marbleclay, metasequia etc) without braking it's workflow.
Ha Caligari truespace, I looked at every version including gameSpace which has good game format export support, the last one (the unfinished standalone Rosetta release) has a great collada/.x export and simpler animation so I'll have to check it out again just for rigging/skinning/animation.
https://united3dartists.com/downloads.html
Animation:Master is a spline modeller which I don't need, I just avoided it, I remember checking for animated exports but also didn't find any.
Shade3D, is too expensive for what it is, IMO, I tried Shade3D for unity back 10 years ago, had great FBX support for the time. Reminded me of older 3DS but modernized. I don't have the email acc I registered the key
Life Forms Studio 4.0 $495 USD LOLz no thanks! just wow!
https://www.credo-interactive.com/purchase/plat_lfstudio4.html
I played around with Natural Motion Endorphin a few years back, I couldn't figure out how to animate figures normally instead of using the physics engine.
SEGA's animanium, I think it's just a plugin for 3D packages.
MotionBuilder 7
https://archive.org/details/motionbuilder7
Looks good, I'll check it out also more and go through the manual.
CharacterFX is limited to low polygon models ie under 2k and doesn't support bump/normal maps
Thanks again for the suggestions, if there's more please drop them here and I'll check it out.
WOW, Credo is still up & running? That's unreal as Lifeforms 4 is like 25 years old now, I got that plus 3.9...
There's Messiah studio which is heavily influenced by Lightwave, shares same shortcuts to a degree uses LWO format... Not easy to learn though...I have down to version 2.2, wish I had version 1.5...
There's An[i]ma 1.5.2 which worked as a plug...
Too bad GMax has no animation it's super stripped down Max4...
There's Catia & also Esperient Creator which is just a later version of Deep Creator...
The spitting is becoming sputtering...
So if it works out well I'll simply install the versions it WILL work for...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WRd5uaM18Qg
Amazing that SEGA had that site up to 2019 and it was a good price at $99 for express, but sucks that it's a plugin. That looks like the kind of app I was hoping to find!
https://web.archive.org/web/20190919065449/http://www.animanium.com/
Please keep me posted if you find it!
The way back have old zips, not the newer ones.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.animanium.com/* click URL and enter .zip
Messiah studio, I downloaded it last week actually and completely forgot about it because it felt so janky and cluttered
https://archive.org/details/messiahmodo
Catia, looks big and expensive!
Esperient Creator, looks good, would you happen to have a copy? Or Deep Creator?
It supports a lot of animated formats, which is good, but wow it was $500 for the base version!
http://www.esperient.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=132&Itemid=219
I'm going to try out TrueSpace 7.61 workspace following the docs.
Thanks again for the suggestions!
So as far as SEGA it installs fine & there's projects you can play with, it's very ingenious & easy... I think the sanfu or achilles heel is in the transfer of data back/forth...
Of course I don't know what I'm doing yet... Tried loading plug in LW 6.5 didn't work but 9.6 did with proper dialogs coming up... Much to take in there so I guessed at some & continued & it scrubbed the timeline reading it, made a timesheet file in folder but crashed when loading the timesheet, so I probably did many things wrong...
Here it is... Crack folder renamed to 'CRANIUM'... Many hoster to can't have 'crack' or 'keygen' or 'patch' names anywhere so I rename now...
https://workupload.com/start/GQuDzVemHLy
OR
https://send.now/uewybug9d2fk
OR
https://sendspace.com/file/vtqg9wp3
Playing standalone-
Dialog panels LW9.6-
I would also like to test out Esperient Creator, if you can share it, it looked in depth and simple also.
I did play around with TrueSpace 7.61 (workspace, both standalone and full modelling) I tried going straight to the animation section of the docs and videos, and it was tough because it assumes you know how to use TS already but that wasn't the real pain... there are many bugs, so you have to use the unofficial update, which means more reading, which I don't want to do for animation.
It's a shame, I really tried and wanted to use TS a few times now, I'm just fighting it too much, even with grok helping me!
The messiahmodo (v5) videos look really impressive, it's like Poser but with out the assets and looks way more sophisticated in rigging and animation, IMO anyway.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100412112503/http://www.projectmessiah.com/x6/videos.html
Looks like there's a big learning curve to it also:
https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/any-messiah-studio-users-out-there/309253/4
The tutorial he mentions are here and they look easy enough to follow, but I've only watch 3.
https://www.youtube.com/@CosmanJoe11/playlists
Messiah is a brainful, better/easier if you have Lightwave knowledge...
I also know the tS paradox... That big-ass GB monster laggy/crashy but so is regular 7.61... There's so much in that GB one it's hard to grasp... I use 7.51 which was last 'scene' release before it went free,less unstable than 7.61 plus the VRay installer needs no VooDoo, installs right in & even makes it default... Many choose to stay with 4.3 which is the most stable these are modeler types of peeps... There's the 'WorkSpace' only version perhaps it is more stable...
Recently did some model shite in Albatross3D for tests, pretty good that way though in other arenas it's unstable like tS-
No breaking of symmetry during but one has to be careful & delete internal faces along symmetry line made during modeling... I discovered it has 'per face' UV mapping like Mirai & Nendo Good for it's 3D paint feature... Haven't tried animation yet but have played with the compositor post-render... I am talking the 2012 version he has a new 64bit 2025 version that has like 700+ MB of python... I tried to get that to work on my windows 10 machine even installing the dependents, nuthin' but errors...
Alright, I'll probe around for Esperient, I have several versions 3.5-3.8 range...
Hey, here about a month ago I re-watched your texture painting in Marbleclay, that was quite clever how you figured that out... I was testing MarbleClay to see if I could I/O LWO models as an alternate to modeling in LW... Didn't really work out well but Modo was perfect...
MarbleClay's UV system wasn't fully finished and primitive and janky, but it's biggest weakness is that same as CharacterFX, large models.
I tried both standalone workplace rossetta and full 7.61 I tested workspace on both at the same time and I think they have the exact same problems.
I couldn't find 7.5x, the video tuts that come with 7.61 were based on 7.51, I saw just now your post on the xp forum from last year, if you still have 7.51 at hand I wouldn't mind testing that, because the videos just make it look so damn easy!
That's impressive in old Albatross3D, I also tried new Albatross3D and saw that it comes with the full python installer, it's weird he would do that because I think you only need a few .dll's to support python in the app, and if I recall really large textures brushes, I guess the larger the download the better it seems :?
I played around with SEGA Animanium animation looks pretty cool but without the big 3D package I guess it's pretty useless to me.
SOOoo.. trying same in 7.51 after dialog it does what it's supposed to do & now faces lite up as I pass over, move faces fine, sweeps fine, go into SDS fine... Everything fine, I actually quite like the D3D lit-up viewports...
I'll probably keep the 7.61 to pick out assets that may work in 7.51 as I did drop in the newest b11 update...
Methinks those at United are trying to revive a sick horse... All I see is once given free make sure it does not 'thrive' before we release it...
This is same with DAZ Hexagon... It was wonderful as Eovia Hexagon then when DAZ bought it up then fired all the staff after saying they'd keep them on hexagon was never the same, buggy, crashy, certainly now low-poly... They then just gave it out free...
OK so you seen the post over there then I'll probably re-up over there for tS...
So no go for Modo huh?... Well, it's quite different now... The first version from 2004 was JUST modeling, UVmapping & material assignments... Pretty damn good & highly compat with Lightwave as it was Peebler from Newtek who left & started Luxology... Same workflow, same shortcuts... There's the first version over at fetuswhere I think...
Modo v2 had 3Dpaint & rendering but LW render way better & surfacing in LW is the best of any just like if you are going to animate you want XSI if you want an easy workflow you want Cinema4D or Carrara if you want a headache you want Blender... I would rather eat my own vomit than use blender...