CAT can become the best rigging system with ability to create procedural facial rig.
It takes a lot of time to create and control character's face. That's why we need this tool.
Main features:
- Fully customizable facial rig. Variable proportions, mimic muscles, tongue, eyes, ears, all control elements already in place.
- Procedural animation for main phonemes and face expressions. Automatic speech animation for printed text.
- Individual animation layer type.
- Ability to load motion capture data.

Add short-key for CAT Setup/Animation Mode Trigger.
At the moment artist have to spend a lot of extra time to switch from current task (for example during changing skin weights - in vertex mode) to select CAT bone->Go to Motion TAb-> And switch Modes.

All this just to see quick result.

A short-key will save a lot of time.

CAT Muscle (Cylinder shape) - working the same way as cat muscle, but covers all 4 sides. Will be useful for arm and leg skinning.
Preferably to add option to add extra mid-handles - to be be to link muscle at any stage to extra bone).

In some cases, you'll need to redefine the rotation order on some bones. However, this doesn't appear to be preserved on the limbs themselves and there doesn't appear to be an ability to set this in Setup Mode without breaking the build-in IK.

I also noticed that animations don't preserve changes in the curve editor... that's just stupid.

When using CATMuscle with Collision Detection objects 3ds max hands because memory leak. It's happens in 3ds max 2011-2013PU6.

1. Create Sphere object.
2. Create CATMsucle.
3. Set "Type" = Mesh
4. Set "U Segs" and "V Segs" = 100
5. Add Sphere object to Collision Detection.
6. Select and move Sphere.
3ds max memory usage grows very fast and after 10 sec 3dsmax is hangs.

video: http://youtu.be/Sy9qbqDmo98

Sometimes, you don't want to flip custom CATbones to the other side. For example, making a face rig with CATbones and then mirroring an animation causes the face to mirror as well with undesirable results.

Every basic rig has a move all dummy\shape at the base of the character that allows for offsets and animation on all 3 axis. The motion extraction node just doesn't do this properly. Doing it by hand and linking the cog and the foot platform to a null seems to be breaking the copy paste options of CAT ( or maybe they just don t work at all). Just extremely annoying when doing keyframe blocking and a sup asks you to flip an animation....and nothing works.

Is impossible to wire CAT for some automations for example if you want using a wire parameters for manage the layer weights when you start to animate any time i use my wired param CAT start to fliker all rig and is impossible to animate. In 3dsmax 2012 this problem not appen

http://youtu.be/rdY-IoTc7wU

This bug appear since 3dsmax 2011 through 2013 PU6 (include all service packs and product updates and hot fixes)

1. Create CATMsucle.
2. Set "L" in properties rollout.
3. Press "Copy muscle settings"
4. Create another one CATMsucle in different location.
5. Set "R" in properties rollout.
6. Press "Paste muscle settings"

Result is not what expected!

all is in the title.... :)
(a preset that can be used also as a tentacle of course..)

The same CAT interfaces on gizmos type to give us more flexibility create/edit them through maxscript (http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/15/ENU/MAXScript-Help/index.html?url=files/GUID-BA8B08CE-96BF-408B-93C0-7A4CDBDC8ABB.htm,topicNumber=d30e729725).

Hability to set/get every Joint Limits Position and Rotation axis values on CAT bones because it is a bit pain to rely on the Link Info > Joint Limits UI..

Default <node>.wirecolor on CAT Bones does not change its colorbox definition so it would be nice an exposed property ie
<catnode>.CATColor or <catnode>.DigitData.CATcolor

Currently, using the MassFx Ragdoll with a CAT Rig is not officially supported in 3dsmax 2013.

We need some kind of system constraining the "knee" and "elbow" joints direction that they will bend to when rotated - at the moment when creating a robot with fixed joints my legs are bending outwards, this would be solvable with a system which enables me to chose bend direction..

after add other objects in CAT can animate this objects inside CAT layer animation and save their animate with clip and pose saving tools

for example create a facial rig with reaction manager and morph for a character with CAT base riging then add facial rig to CAT system and use CAT tools for animating facial rig in layers and save their animation clips with CAT tools

When you use Gizmos in your Setup Pose and then want to duplicate the Rig it causes straneg stretches of the bones that are applied to it
Pls fix that so anyone can just use Gizmos and duplicate their Rig

Currently, If you are halfway into your CAT animation and wish to make changes to your Character's mesh topology, you can kiss that whole project goodbye as CAT just stops working and flips you the bird.

We could do this all the way back in the "bone-rig" age, so why not now with CAT? I'm surprised this hasn't been opened as a bug before, as in most studios, your "final mesh" is hardly ever your final mesh.

Ability to make relations between layers.
For example:
- linking visibility with parent layer
- linking time warp
- local limb weight
- etc
The idea is to have some parent layers which can transfer some of its features to other layers.
Also to mark which additive layers should be enabled with current parent layer.