PMG's Messiah 3.0 offers exciting innovations in 3D character animation tools and is jam-packed with new features that are rapidly expanding the popularity of this software.
Messiah offers real-time playback speed, which is a blessing to any animator. Without having to waste time on previews, animators can work quickly and efficiently to produce a higher quality of work in a shorter time.
Messiah supplies a no-nonsense user interface that is easy to navigate and customize, allowing the user to feel more comfortable within the 3D environment. A pleasant surprise is how many settings the user is allowed to change to suit their personal workflow.
Messiah 3.0 does not have it's own modeling tools, but allows you to import a model from a variety of 3D modeling programs, including Lightwave 5.x or 6.x objects (.lwo), Wavefront objects (.obj), 3DS (.3ds), BioVision Mocap Data (.bvh), DXF objects (.dxf), Messiah Motion (.fxm), Messiah Scene (.fxs), Motion Analysis Hierarchical Translation Rotation (.htr).
Once the model is imported the user can create an animation rig. You point and click to create the bone, and Messiah uses its own initiative and skins the bone for you. Creating an armature for a character can often be a frustrating, time-consuming affair, but with Messiah, the process is easy. Copying an armature from one character to another is easy, and requires only a small amount of time to adjust the rig to fit the new character.
Animating with a fully rigged character in Messiah is as easy as spreading butter on bread. Nothing holds you back and you can truly lose yourself in the joy of breathing life and personality into the character. Changing between the timeline and the dope sheet is a simple click away, and for someone like me who uses a pose to pose method to create the initial animation, easy access to the dope sheet is a must.
Editing and deleting keys is a quick, easy process, and Messiah offers a variety of on-screen tools and sliders that are great for facial deformations and phonemes.
The compose tab allows the user to create clips for the character, which are easy to insert anywhere on the timeline. This is especially useful and time-saving for adding walk sequences into a shot.
To render, one must bake out the character motion and then load the character in the software that they wish to render in. The Messiah plug-in then deforms the vertices of the character frame-by-frame. This process is a bit frustrating at first, but again, Messiah does all the hard work, which allows you to concentrate on other aspects of the production.
On the whole, PMG's Messiah 3.0 is a powerful piece of software, focusing specifically on the needs of character animators and rigging artists. It is affordable, straight-forward and offers plenty of long awaited animation tools. PMG's innovations with this software have caused a lot of excitement in the animation industry and I look forward to enjoying future upgrades of this software.
