Animtation Solutions for Purchased Assets

I am a 3D artist, a decent modeller and a good animator overall, but my focus right now is creating a compelling game wiht Unity 3D, and most importantly, being able to extend/customize and re-use content I have purchased.

I love the models produced by DexSoft games.

http://www.dexsoft-games.com/

However, the characters have a limited set of animations available which is a problem for the RPG I am working on. So I was faced with a dilemna - how do I add more animation and expand the versatility of my characters?

Three solutions leap to mind.

1) Do it from scratch. If I have the same software as the original developer of the content, I can open the source files and hand animate new sequences adding them to the existing ones. Since I am a Lightwave user that's an issues since most Game Asset Developers seem to use Maya or Max. This stifles option 1 for me.

2) Use MIXAMO to add the animations I am missing.

http://www.mixamo.com/

Mixamo is GREAT and all their animations really do work as advertised. Thier process is simple, upload your character, synch up the rigging (they have a pretty easy to use interface for that), select and tweak the animations you need, and download them when you're finished. The caveat here... the Price. You can buy bundles of prices that help mitigate the costs, but that cool Dexsoft character I picked up for $40 USD suddenly becomes a $75-$100 investment once I've added all the animations I want -- presuming of course that suitable ones can be found. Overall verdict, very usable, and not a bad solution, though somewhat limiting due to price and the variety of animations available.

3) Use Project:Messiah.

http://www.projectmessiah.com/x6/shop.html

Project Messiah is an Animation and Rendering powerhouse. It natively reads FBX as well as animations & scenes created in Lightwave, Maya, Max, Modo, and a variety of other formats. It of course, exports clean Unity Ready FBX files as well!

P:M is my workaround for the 1st option, giving me the ability to grab purchased assets and actually be able to animate them freely w/some amazing tools (like Auto-Walk and Auto-Rigging for example). Since it works with essentially every major 3D package out there, I can even model extra equipment, garb etc, or make wholesale changes to my purchased Meshes and RETAIN thier animations (P:M will isolate and save the rigs for me to re-use!).

Last but not least, is the price -- right now, you can grab a full version of the latest Project:Messiah for just $10, yes TEN dollars, and a PRO version for only $40!

Here's the breakdown between versions (Normal Prices: $499/$1195 Pro) so you can see the feature list in each.

http://www.projectmessiah.com/x6/products.html

Conclusions:

Both Mixamo and P:M offer hugely beneficial and if you jump in now, extremely powerful additions to my toolset. They let me take purchased assets and really let them shine.

I hope this helps you in your own Game Development work!

All the best,

AF