Ambition Aside...

I have come to one conclusion - 3ds Max is NOT my friend. I extended the olive branch of peace, it quoted me Braveheart - "Are you ready for a war?"

Rigging/skinning is an absolute nightmare - it's no wonder why few people do it. Now I could tough it out if it were a model or two, but I'm looking to bring in 7 or more - and THEN animate the suckers on top of that! One of my models is a centipede - you know how many bones is in one of those?! No amount of coffee could save me from that insanity.

So it dawned on me that basically I've been trying to reinvent the wheel - a lose-lose situation. I have perfectly fine rigged and textured Poser models that I've been trying to re-rig for Max all so I could import it into iClone. Plus, I lose the advantage of the preset poses and gain the headache of re-boning/skinning/ini creating/and animating from scratch.

There is but one solution. I've got to learn Poser. It's a concession but hell, it's one I can live with. Yes, the technical achievement of using Max would have been great, but I'm thinking at too great of a cost. The trick for me now is trying to find a way to integrate Poser with iClone as seamlessly as possible - as if I had the model in iClone to begin with. I'm thinking that's gonna take some clever greenscreening, masking and footage layering but it just might work.

The upside is that I can include all the non-bipedal models I was hoping to use - even the complex ones, without fear of crashing iClone with the crazy polycount. I'm sure as I get more into the process I'll find something that won't work as well as I envision, but that's another problem for another day.