I bought Fragmotion in the hope that it would let me do a better job than with CharacterFX, but I was wrong.
Really guys, if you want WYSIWYG bone animation in DBPro, CharacterFX is free, and is so easy to use that my first real attempt at a character made it to a finished game - from nought to bone animated characters in about 2 days. It's not the rocket surgery it appears to be if you find the right software.
Never stop just because the software doesn't flow well with you - there are alternatives. I tried probably hundreds of different pieces of software before I found the set that works with my workflow. I mean, I went from 3DS Max animation to CharacterFX because I just couldn't get results with the animation system for bones - limbs is just fine, but bones is just horrible IMO without real practice or training or medication. My point is that you load up CFX and import a model, drop on the bones in a logical sequence and assign the vertexes to those bones - balancing and checking the vertex weights to ensure nice movement. Then animation is just keyframes like a lot of people will be used to already. The interface is quite dynamic but standard, you can arrange the viewports however you like, and the main functions of the program are all together.
That's the thing with media, and this might be considered a rant by now but it's the truth - bloated software is no good for learning on, and until you learn the core aspects, there's just no progress. Once you understand the principles you can go onto learning more complex things, but in DBPro and FPSC it's a lot simpler than those bloated applications will have you believe. Compare Fragmotion to CharacterFX:
Fragmotion:
http://www.arteria3d.com/pictures/3355/1/1221491-1.jpg
Look at all that stuff, how much of that is being used at one time! - pity help anyone trying to learn that program from scratch.
Now look at CharacterFX:
http://learngamedesign.com/gdt_E1.html
That's quite a popular tutorial, so I posted a link to it instead of a screenshot - but as you can see the GUI is very bare, because it only concerns itself with what you actually need. A bone animated model in DBPro supports bone rotation and offsetting, and these bones have vertices assigned to them at varying strengths - then when the bones are animated the vertices are adjusted to suit. That's it. You don't need any more than a bit of care when rigging and a keyframe editor. CharacterFX is far less complex than other systems, yet ironically it's actually closer to the real data and real results you can actually achieve. Can it make animations like the one in that video? - well the answer is of course it can, but can you!.
The bottom line is that the finished media has limitations, and the cheap and free software out there surfs along these limitations, letting you push them as far as they can go within the defined limitations of DBPro.
