Character Animation Toolkit (CAT) was originally intended to be a platform for developing multi-legged skeletons, as opposed to 3ds Max's native biped tool. It was originally written as a plugin for 3ds Max by Phil Taylor, who I worked with in my hometown of Dunedin, New Zealand, before it was acquired as a plugin by Softimage (since Phil went to work there). Now integrated into 3ds Max, CAT itself is still being developed. The newest version of 3ds Max 2013 sees some better CAT integration with MotionBuilder. On the Autodesk Area forum, you may notice Louis Marcoux in particular has posted some great demonstrations of CAT in action. So let's look at how CAT works.
Open the scene
\Packt3dsMax\Chapter 10\Creature_CATStart.max
, or continue from where you left off. In the provided file, the different creature meshes have been set to different layers named after their resolution. SelectCreature_LowRes
and right-click and select Hide Unselected.Notice the mesh has...