(Updated July 19, 2006) According to one of our readers CAT is already developing version 3 of their 3DS Max plugin. Read the comments posted on this news item for more. (Important: This information has yet to be confirmed by Character Animation Technologies.)
(Updated July 18, 2006) Softimage has recently published a FAQ stating that Avid has acquired CAT’s intellectual property assets and that certain hardware assets, CAT stock, etc., have been left out of the deal. Again, there’s no reference to the development of future versions of CAT for Max.
Character Animation Techologies, developers of the 3DS Max plugin Character Animation Toolkit have been acquired by Avid and are being managed by Softimage. CAT’s CTO, Philip Taylor, has joined the Softimage team in Montreal. As expected, there is no mention of further development of the plugin for 3DS Max. More information at CAToolkit.com.
Softimage catches a CAT
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CAT will continue to be developed for max. I’m beta-testing CAT 3 (and using it in production) and have no fears about Softimage pulling CAT out of max. If anyone bothers to think it through, it would be a bad move to stop making CAT for max. The logic is simple; no CAT for max, no $ coming in until the CAT tech is ported to something else. Taking CAT out of max (especially without it being available elsewhere) does not get you more customers, but it could cause you to lose potential customers. I’m sure that Softimage has thought long and hard about this.
BTW: CAT 3 is cool, has some great new functionality, but, of course, I can’t talk about it, other than to say that character TD’s will be getting some lovin’ with this release.
Hi Scott.
That’s great news. Thanks for posting.