No it doesn’t.
Anyway if you want a good rigging plug in for Maya, try ‘The Setup Machine’, its awesome… Just google it…
MrJames
Softwares like max and maya suck because of thier horrible user interface.
Softwares like zbrush works so well because of thier terrific easy to use UI.
Give a noob( of both softwares) zbrush and maya and he will catch the former much faster then maya.
If only maya was so good there wouldnt have been any need to create other 3d softwares.
2 yrs back max and maya were the standard, today the balance is shifting to other softwares.
You may have lot of practice with maya thats why it doenst suck for you.
But it always suck for any noob as a lot and lot of time is required to learn it much more then any new softwares. 
anyhow thanks for the “setup machine” will check it out.
What other software besides xsi ? It’s still pretty much the standard for animation
2 yrs back max and maya were the standard, today the balance is shifting to other softwares.
Its down also to the factor of if you actualy want a legal copy in which case XSI foundation is the one to go for if you want rigging. Maya, 3ds max are way way to expensive for the everage person.
I got the tiral of 3ds max and loved it then went to see the price and then realized I had just waisted learning 2 weeks for software I cant afford, a mistake im not going to make again.
All I need is zbrush 2.5 for its rigging/posing and a simple base mesh program like silo, but who knows maybe I wont even need that when zbrush 2.5 comes out.
softwares like maya and max are only for big production houses.
not good enough on a individual level.
Believe me even I am waiitng for zbrush 2.5 but my project cant wait till its launch.
Thats why looking for other softwares. no optiopn left
Time to get the chip off your shoulder mate. Maya and Max are fantastic, saying they suck just shows lack of understanding for some fantastic and innovative products. Not that I want this to get into a software flame war, so this will be my last post.
I got on realy well with max but as said above its not afordable for the average joe.
I rekon that messiah could be dam good but cant find a dam manual.
I have run the demo on my computer with an nvidia fx5200 (4th generation), which is a pretty old card. You can get them pretty cheap.
But you can get a third generation card which will crush the poor 5200, for just a little bit more.
Also, if you’re using an ati card, make sure you have the latest drivers and you follow the tips about forcing the z-buffer depth to 16 bits or it won’t really run at all.
I’m not sure what you mean about weighting, but here’s a sample of what zbrush and messiah can do together. http://206.145.80.237/zbrush/pug/ZBrushUserMeeting_Taron.zip (from here http://pixologic.com/zbrush/interviews/pixomeeting.html). Using two programs together always involves some work on your part. The latest version of messiah has some new features to increase it’s zbrush compatibility too.
disclaimer: I’m a hobbiest, and I know nothing of any value to anybody, and I haven’t had any time to do anything serious with messiah, although it’s pretty high up there on my list of things to explore when (hah!) I have time.
I have spent quite a bit of time looking around for something that I can use to pose figures though (like you), and if you don’t need to animate it, I think messiah is the best bet to getting it done quickly and cheaply (at this point in time). If you’re doing still renders of the same figure and the posing doesn’t quite work as well as you want while you figure it out, you can always pull the figure back and to zbrush and do some manual adjustment very quickly. It has a nice renderer too and the animation capabilities give you a lot of things to play with too.
Thanks billrobertson for that info.
anyhow someone tried this ?
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=397&Itemid=
is it comaptible with zbrush ?
LoL Well if you dont like maya and max you will definitly dont like houdini… Master comes with a pricetag of $17.000… And I am pretty sure it is as or even little bit more complex 
lols iw as still browsing through its pages , didnt still reached the price menu
that was shocking price:D
Each bone has to control what parts of the mesh move/deform. vertices get assigned to the bones that the bone can or canot move. Also weighting can be applied by the strength or amount of Influence the bones have to certain vertices. Weighting problems are comon and somtmes have to be tweaked for some time in my case lol. Bad weighting can make your mesh apear badly deformed like when you position the arm from a T pose down to your characters side, you may see the arm pits dip into the chest.
Guys how many of you have tried reposing in zbrush only using zspheres ?
any good result with it ?
pls share your experince
Pose to pose method works and have have good results from it. it can be a tad tricky but iv done ok with it. Il be happy to show how well its works for me using this method.
I use PMG Messiah studio, and am pretty happy with it. Would definitely recommend it over Carrera for your stated needs. The workstation price at $299 is great for anything that gives you a Global illumination/Radiosity renderer, but too bad they dont appear to be selling “Messiah:animate” anymore which was the rig/animation tools without the renderer…that was even cheaper.
Zbrush and Messiah work well together, and theres been develpment on the messiah end to specifically improve Zbrush interaction. The bones work well, and theyre very adjustable and pretty accurate on their own. In many situations you probably wont have to wrry too much about weight maps, especially, if youre just swapping in and out of ZB where you can touch up mild distortions.
However, PMG has a very different way of doing some things, and the program is not without its learning curve (unless you were weaned on it when it was a staple LW plugin). The node based rendering and texturing in particular, is very interesting, but not for everyone.
And finally, in all honesty, Im not sure how much life PMG has left in it from a development standpoint. Im not in any postition to know, but I dont know how succesful theyve been, and development, while it still continues, is sort of a slow crawl. Anyone more informed can feel free to correct me on this…this is just my impression.
In addition to the features promised in the next ZB version, about which little of practical value can be assessed yet, the new version of Silo promises some typically Silo-esqe accesible rigging and bones also, and thats due very soon. It might be worth waiting on a major purchase, especially if your needs are simple.
Hope this is helpful.
Id like to get to know Messiah studio more but there isnt a manual with demo?
The “manual” is not so much a manual as it is a collection of formatted help docs. I dont have the demo download to be sure, but I would check in the docs folder.
And the dedicated Messiah forum at CG talk would probably be your best bet for an interactive knowledge base of users:
There’s a windows help file that comes with it that is enough to get you past the “oh god where do I click” phase.
edit regarding the suitability of pose 2 pose. I think it can work, but I also think it will require a good deal of patience. Check out the thirty-one page thread on experimenting with it to get good results.
edit edit
I don’t think bones are on the plate for Silo 2.0.
My mistake, Bill’s right. They are “in development”, but have not been announced as a 2.0 feature.